Impurity and Trace Tritium Transport in Tokamak Edge Turbulence

Abstract

The turbulent transport of impurity or minority species, as for example Tritium, is investigated in drift-Alfv\'en edge turbulence. The full effects of perpendicular and parallel convection are kept for the impurity species. The impurity density develops a granular structure with steep gradients and locally exceeds its initial values due to the compressibility of the flow. An approximate decomposition of the impurity flux into a diffusive part and an effective convective part (characterized by a pinch velocity) is performed and a net inward pinch effect is recovered. The pinch velocity is explained in terms of Turbulent Equipartition and is found to vary poloidally. The results show that impurity transport modeling needs to be two-dimensional, considering besides the radial direction also the strong poloidal variation in the transport coefficients.