Neoclassical transport simulations for stellarators

The benchmarking of the thermal neoclassical transport coefficients is described using examples of the Large Helical Device (LHD) and TJ-II stellarators. The thermal coefficients are evaluated by energy convolution of the monoenergetic coefficients obtained by direct interpolation or neural network techniques from the databases precalculated by different codes. The temperature profiles are calculated by a predictive transport code from the energy balance equations with the ambipolar radial electric field estimated from a diffusion equation to guarantee a unique and smooth solution, although several solutions of the ambipolarity condition may exist when root-finding is invoked; the density profiles are fixed. The thermal transport coefficients as well as the ambipolar radial electric field are compared and very reasonable agreement is found for both configurations. Together with an additional W7-X case, these configurations represent very different degrees of neoclassical confinement at low collisionalities. The impact of the neoclassical optimization on the energy confinement time is evaluated and the confinement times for different devices predicted by transport modeling are compared with the standard scaling for stellarators. Finally, all configurations are scaled to the same volume for a direct comparison of the volume-averaged pressure and the neoclassical degree of optimization. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3553025]