Progress in development of the ITER High Fidelity Plasma Simulator

The ITER High Fidelity Plasma Simulator (HFPS), currently being developed by combining a core-edge-SOL transport modelling code, JINTRAC, and a free-boundary plasma equilibrium evolution code, DINA, will be used to complete and refine the development of ITER plasma scenarios as well as to study ITER physics interpreting the experimental observations. The first proto-type of the ITER HFPS has been recently developed following the IMAS integrated modelling paradigm and using two different code and physics coupling schemes, namely loose and close coupling, in order to facilitate the verification of validity ranges of close coupling simulations, where the explicit data exchange is applied not to deteriorate the overall performance of the coupled simulation at the data exchange frequency tuned for magnetic controllers. The first proto-type has successfully demonstrated its potential for integrated free-boundary and core transport modelling by applying it to ITER scenarios. These simulations also captured non-linear responses of the free-boundary plasma to transients such as the current ramp-up and confinement mode transitions, as well as to the magnetic and kinetic controls using the PF coils, heating and current drive, and fuelling systems. A further extension of the high fidelity physics modelling capability across the plasma core, edge/SOL and target area is foreseen with the application of parallelized/reduced physics-based transport and source models and the implementation of self-consistent updates of the SOL grids along with the free-boundary equilibrium evolution.