Modeling Heat Transport in Magnetized Plasmas

Understanding the transport of heat in magnetized plasmas is imperative to furthering efforts towards controlled thermonuclear fusion. This work analyzes various physical models and numerical algorithms that are useful in studying temperature equilibration due to anisotropic heat transport. The study includes two numerical approaches to the standard Braginskii closure, the more accurate using a mixed auxiliary scalar in the finite-element formulation. The physically correct kinetic closure for heat flow parallel to the magnetic field is also tested for robustness and accuracy in velocity space for a number of magnetic geometries