Nonlinear transport processes in tokamak plasmas. I. The collisional regimes

An application of the thermodynamic field theory (TFT) to transport processes in L-mode tokamak plasmas is presented. The nonlinear corrections to the linear ('Onsager') transport coefficients in the collisional regimes are derived. A quite encouraging result is the appearance of an asymmetry between the Pfirsch-Schlueter (P-S) ion and electron transport coefficients: the latter presents a nonlinear correction, which is absent for the ions, and makes the radial electron coefficients much larger than the former. Explicit calculations and comparisons between the neoclassical results and the TFT predictions for Joint European Torus (JET) plasmas are also reported. It is found that the nonlinear electron P-S transport coefficients exceed the values provided by neoclassical theory by a factor that may be of the order 10². The nonlinear classical coefficients exceed the neoclassical ones by a factor that may be of order 2. For JET, the discrepancy between experimental and theoretical results for the electron losses is therefore significantly reduced by a factor 10² when the nonlinear contributions are duly taken into account but, there is still a factor of 10² to be explained. This is most likely due to turbulence. The expressions of the ion transport coefficients, determined by the neoclassical theory in these two regimes, remain unaltered. The low-collisional regimes, i.e., the plateau and the banana regimes, are analyzed in the second part of this work