Flexible test of reduced transport models for SPARC scenarios in ASTRA

The prediction of transport and confinement is crucial in burning plasmas of nuclear fusion experiments. There are several ways to perform such predictions, mainly based on experimental trends or physics-based modeling. The former often misses physics details and precise description of the kinetic profiles. Therefore, it is necessary to perform physics-based modeling of the core transport for reliable performance predictions. An integrated transport analysis for SPARC scenarios has been obtained in a previous work [P. Rodriguez-Fernandez et al., J. Plasma Phys. (2020), vol. 86, 865860503], using the TRANSP 1.5D transport solver with TGLF as reduced transport model and validating the kinetic profiles with nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations. Preliminary results of the transport predictions within the ASTRA framework, a 1.5D highly customizable transport solver, will be compared with the previous TRANSP results for high performance scenarios in SPARC. The flexibility of ASTRA will allow the development and test of multiple transport models. Work supported by Commonwealth Fusion Systems.