The Fusion Group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the National Fusion Laboratory at CIEMAT (Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas) have actively collaborated for more than ten years. Over the recent years, the collaboration has focused on the modelling of plasma instabilities in the CIEMAT-based TJ-II stellarator device. It has recently resulted in a publication in the Nuclear Fusion journal and a related follow-up project on the modelling of energetic particle behaviour in TJ-II plasmas.
This January Edgar Olivares and Ignacio López de Arbina from the BSC Fusion group spent few intensive weeks at CIEMAT to work on this new project. The project involves two Monte Carlo codes: the ISDEP code, which has been previously used at CIEMAT to simulate energetic ions at TJ-II, and the ASCOT code which stands for “Accelerated Simulation of Charged Particle Orbits in a Tokamak” and not been used for simulations of TJ-II before. Although its name makes explicit reference to tokamaks, ASCOT can be used, with the corresponding modifications, in a stellarator machine, such as TJ-II.
With ASCOT, the CIEMAT-BSC collaboration has extended to the ASCOT team at Aalto University, Finland. Thanks to their fast technical support, the implementation of the required new features in the code to simulate TJ-II has progressed very smoothly.
The stay at CIEMAT was very useful in order to set up ASCOT code to run for some specific TJ-II plasmas and prepare for the first simulations. We expect to have the first results of the simulations on MareNostrum in the near future to compare the results of the two codes.