1D2V Gyrokinetic Simulations of Parallel Transport in a Scrape-Off Layer Plasma using Discontinuous Galerkin Algorithms

We have performed 1D2V gyrokinetic simulations of ELM pulse propagation along a scrape-off layer plasma and measured the resulting time profile of the heat deposition on the divertor plate. The ELM modeling problem is based on a case studied in recent literature, and results using kinetic ions and electrons will be presented. The model is implemented in Gkeyll, a prototype code exploring discontinuous Galerkin (DG) algorithms for modeling the edge plasma in fusion devices and basic plasma experiments like LAPD. To handle the effect of collisions, the model uses a Lenard-Bernstein collision operator, which conserves total number, momentum, and kinetic energy. The diffusive term in the collision operator is implemented using a recovery-based DG method. We will also present results from a test problem of ion-acoustic wave damping in a collisional plasma used to study resolution requirements and to benchmark with Braginskii's transport coefficients.