Magneto-inertial confinement of turbulent plasma

A one-fluid model describing the axisymmetric plasma confinement in a Simple Magnetized Torus (SMT) is formulated, discussed and studied numerically. This configuration does not exhibit a stationary MHD-equilibrium state, but the present work shows that the Reynolds stress-tensor due to the inertial forces from turbulent velocity fluctuations is sufficient to secure an equilibrium of time-averaged quantities. Numerical solutions demonstrates how a cathode generated plasma develops a spiralling vortex that evolves towards increasingly smaller spatial scales. Hence turbulence develops from a driven, non-equilibrium situation, and not from an instability of an equilibrium. (orig.)