Gyrokinetic full-torus simulations of ohmic tokamak plasmas in circular limiter configuration

Abstract The gyrokinetic full 5D particle distribution code ELMFIRE has been extended to simulate circular tokamak plasmas from the magnetic axis to the limiter scrape-off-layer. The predictive power of the code in the full-torus configuration is tested via its ability to reproduce experimental steady-state profiles in FT-2 ohmic L-mode plasmas. The results show that the experimental profile solution is not reproduced numerically due to the difficulty of obtaining global power balance. This is verified by cross-comparison of ELMFIRE code versions, which shows also the impact of boundary conditions and grid resolution on turbulent transport.