Effect of poloidal asymmetries on impurity peaking in tokamaks

Poloidal impurity asymmetries are frequently observed in tokamaks. In this paper, the effect of poloidal asymmetry on electrostatic turbulent transport is studied, including the effect of the E x B drift. Collisions are modeled by a Lorentz operator, and the gyrokinetic equation is solved with a variational approach. The impurity transport is shown to be sensitive to the magnetic shear and changes sign for s greater than or similar to 0.5 in the presence of inboard accumulation. The zero-flux impurity density gradient (peaking factor) is shown to be rather insensitive to collisions in both ion temperature gradient and trapped electron mode driven cases. Our results suggest that the asymmetry (both the location of its maximum and its strength) and the magnetic shear are the two most important parameters that affect the impurity peaking. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4719711]