Bayesian analysis of turbulent transport coefficients in 2D interchange dominated ExB turbulence involving flow shear

Abstract

Abstract While turbulent transport is known to dominate the radial particle and energy transport in the plasma edge, a self-consistent description of turbulent transport in mean-field transport codes remains lacking. Mean-field closure models based on the turbulent kinetic energy (k ⊥) and turbulent enstrophy (ζ⊥) have recently been proposed to self-consistently model this transport. This contribution analyses the diffusive particle transport relations of these models by means of the Bayesian framework for parameter estimation and model comparison. The reference data includes a set of isothermal simulations that not only include the scrape-off layer (SOL) but also the outer core region (in which a drift wave-like model is activated) and a set of anisothermal SOL simulations, both obtained with the TOKAM2D turbulence code. This analysis shows that the k ⊥(–ζ⊥) model does not appropriately capture the diffusion coefficients for these new data sets, presumably due to the strong flows in the diamagnetic direction that appear in these new cases. While flow shear is expected to quench the turbulence and the turbulent transport, its effect was not explicitly taken into account in the earlier k ⊥(–ζ⊥) transport models. As flow shear provides a new mechanism for the decorrelation of the turbulence, we propose to introduce an additional time scale in the diffusive transport relation as D ∼ k ⊥ / ( ζ ⊥ + Ω S ) . Inspiration is drawn from shear decorrelation times reported in literature to propose several new candidate models, which are then analysed in a Bayesian setting. This allowed identifying irrelevant terms for certain models and to rank all models according to the Bayesian evidence. While the new models accounting for shear do improve the match to the data, significant errors still remain. Also, no single model could be identified that performs best for all data sets.