A κ−ε model for plasma anomalous transport in tokamaks: closure via the scaling of the global confinement

Abstract A reduced model for radial anomalous transport of plasma in tokamaks, inspired by the Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes ( RANS ) approach, is presented assuming diffusion as governing mechanism. In order to self-consistently calculate transport coefficients, an empirical equation is built for the turbulent kinetic energy and the system is closed via the scaling law of global confinement. In such way the SOL width appears to recover experimental dependencies with respect to machine parameters and interestingly, when the model is implemented in a 2D transport code for a realistic study-case, mean fields retrieve some features already observed in 1st-principle turbulent codes.