Student Posters Repository

Electromagnetic turbulent flows determine the thermal insulation of magnetically confined plasmas. Using nuclear fusion as an energy source is possible on earth, but the efficiency and profitability are limited by the thermal insulation of these plasmas – the better the insulation, the smaller and cheaper the device can be. Reliable extrapolation, like in a wind tunnel, from small experiments (0.2-1 m radius) to large reactors (>7 m) is not yet possible – making computer models crucial.

Turbulence emerges from non-linearity: the flow carries itself. Plasma flows are carried by electromagnetic fields and contain very different space and time scales, making the complete physical model computationally intractable - hierarchical sets of reduced models with decoupled scales are used instead. This requires a modular and flexible computational framework.

Instabilities on scales of ~1 mm must be resolved as well as flows on reactor scale - efficient use of HPC resources is therefore mandatory. Our code is specifically designed to consider complex anisotropic magnetic geometries of real reactors and therefore utilizes a special MPI + OpenMP parallelization scheme. For realistic predictive simulations the performance must still increase, though, by farther domain decomposition and utilization of GPUs.