Reevaluation of the Braginskii viscous force for toroidal plasma

Abstract

The model by Braginskii for the viscous stress tensor is used to determine the shear and gyroviscous forces acting within a toroidally confined plasma. Comparison is made to a previous evaluation which contains an inconsistent treatment of the radial derivative and neglects the effect of the pitch angle. Parallel viscosity contributes a radial shear viscous force which may develop for sufficient vertical asymmetry to the ion velocity profile. An evaluation is performed of this radial viscous force for a tokamak near equilibrium which indicates qualitative agreement between theory and measurement for impure plasma discharges with strong toroidal flow.