Aurora: a modern toolbox for particle transport and radiation modeling

Github repo: https://github.com/fsciortino/Aurora

Paper/presentation in Plasma Physics & Fusion Energy and on the arXiv.

Overview

Aurora is a package to simulate heavy-ion transport and radiation in magnetically-confined plasmas. It includes a 1.5D impurity transport forward model which inherits many of the methods from the historical STRAHL code and has been thoroughly benchmarked with it. It also offers routines to analyze neutral states of hydrogen isotopes, both from the edge of fusion plasmas and from neutral beam injection. The package includes a public release of the Fast and Accurate Collisional Impurity Transport (FACIT) model for the calculation of neoclassical diffusion and convection coefficients in tokamak plasmas. Aurora’s code is mostly written in Python 3 and Fortran 90. A Julia interface has also recently been added. The package enables radiation calculations using ADAS atomic rates, which can easily be applied to the output of Aurora’s own forward model, or coupled with other 1D, 2D or 3D transport codes.

Guido Reni - L'Aurora

Aurora fresco, by Guido Reni (circa 1612-1614)

This documentation aims at making Aurora usage as clear as possible. Getting started is easy - see the Installation section. To learn the basics, head to the Tutorial section.

What is Aurora useful for?

Aurora is useful for modeling of particle transport, impurities, neutrals and radiation in fusion plasmas.

The package includes Python functionality to create inputs and read/plot outputs of impurity transport simulations. It was designed to be as efficient as possible in iterative workflows, where parameters (particularly diffusion and convection coefficients) are run through the forward model and repeatedly modified in order to match some experimental observations. For this reason, Aurora avoids any disk input-output (I/O) during operation. All data is kept in memory.

Aurora provides convenient interfaces to load a default namelist via default_nml(), modify it as required and then pass the resulting namelist dictionary into the simulation setup. This is in the aurora_sim class, which allows creation of radial and temporal grids, interpolation of atomic rates, preparation of parallel loss rates at the edge, etc.

The aurora.atomic library provides functions to load and interpolate atomic rates from ADAS ADF-11 files, as well as from ADF-15 photon emissivity coefficients (PEC) files. PEC data can alternatively be computed using the collisional-radiative model of ColRadPy, using methods in aurora.radiation.

Aurora also includes a Python version of the FACIT code, described in the Tutorials section of this documentation, which allows users to rapidly estimate neoclassical impurity transport coefficients. This capability is particularly useful in integrated transport modeling, as well as in experimental inference of impurity transport coefficients.

A number of standard tests and examples are provided using a real set of Alcator C-Mod kinetic profiles and geometry. In order to interface with EFIT gEQDSK files, Aurora makes use of the omfit_eqdsk package, which offers flexibility to work with data from many devices worldwide. Users may easily substitute this dependence with different magnetic reconstruction packages and/or postprocessing interfaces, if required. Interfacing Aurora with several file formats used throughout the fusion community to store kinetic profiles is simple.

Aurora was born as a fast forward model of impurity transport, but it can also be useful for synthetic spectroscopic diagnostics and radiation modeling in fusion plasmas. For example, it may be helpful for parameter scans to explore the performance of future devices. The radiation_model() method allows one to use ADAS atomic rates and given kinetic profiles to compute line radiation, bremsstrahlung, continuum and soft-x-ray-filtered radiation. Ionization equilibria can also be computed using the atomic() methods, thus enabling simple “constant-fraction” models where the total density of an impurity species is fixed to a certain percentage of the electron density. Background neutrals, either from the edge or from neutral beam injection, can be analyzed using the aurora.neutrals and aurora.nbi_neutrals libraries.

Documentation contents

Indices and tables