Resistive diffusion in an axisymmetric plasma

The equations describing the classical resistive evolution of an axisymmetric toroidal plasma are developed in a formulation amenable to numerical solution. A set of one dimensional averaged transport equations describes the evolution of the pressure and toroidal magnetic field relative to the poloidal flux. The evolution of the flux is obtained from the time differentiated Grad-Shafranov equation. An efficient algorithm for finding numerical solutions to the resulting linear generalized differential equation, which may be applicable to similar problems, is described, and results obtained from the algorithm are presented