The effect of turbulent stresses on the experimental determination of a thermal diffusivity due to turbulent transport

Abstract

In plasmas where the transport processes are dominated by turbulence, it is not always straightforward to identify the magnitude of the experimental transport diffusion coefficients. This is primarily due to the fact that with turbulent transport, the separation of the convective and conductive terms depends upon the type of turbulence and/or the model which is used to describe it. For the energy transport it is not just a matter of deciding whether the convection term is 5/2 or 3/2 times the product of the particle flux and the temperature. It is also important to identify turbulence generated convection terms such as heat pinches which can obscure the correct evaluation of the thermal diffusivity. Here we show that inclusion of the turbulence induced stresses into the transport model identifies a heat pinch term and changes the expression for the thermal diffusivity. Comparison with experimental results shows that the new calculated ion thermal diffusivity is no longer less than the neoclassical value even for plasmas with very good ion thermal confinement.