A convergence study for the Laguerre expansion in the moment equation method for neoclassical transport in general toroidal plasmas

The dependence of neoclassical parallel flow calculations on the maximum order of Laguerre polynomial expansions is investigated in a magnetic configuration of the Large Helical Device [S. Murakami, A. Wakasa, H. Maassberg, et al., Nucl. Fusion 42, L19 (2002)] using the monoenergetic coefficient database obtained by an international collaboration. On the basis of a previous generalization (the so-called Sugama-Nishimura method [H. Sugama and S. Nishimura, Phys. Plasmas 15, 042502 (2008)]) to an arbitrary order of the expansion, the 13 M, 21 M, and 29 M approximations are compared. In a previous comparison, only the ion distribution function in the banana collisionality regime of single-ion-species plasmas in tokamak configurations was investigated. In this paper, the dependence of the problems including electrons and impurities in the general collisionality regime in an actual nonsymmetric toroidal configuration is reported. In particular, qualities of approximations for the electron distribution function are investigated in detail. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3475792]