Self-consistent modeling of plasma response to impurity spreading from intense localized source

Non-hydrogen impurities unavoidably exist in hot plasmas of present fusion devices. They enter it intrinsically, due to plasma interaction with the wall of vacuum vessel, as well as are seeded for various purposes deliberately. Normally, the spots where injected particles enter the plasma are much smaller than its total surface. Under such conditions one has to expect a significant modification of local plasma parameters through various physical mechanisms, which, in turn, affect the impurity spreading. Self-consistent modeling of interaction between impurity and plasma is, therefore, not possible with linear approaches. A model based on the fluid description of electrons, main and impurity ions, and taking into account the plasma quasi-neutrality, Coulomb collisions of background and impurity charged particles, radiation losses, particle transport to bounding surfaces, is elaborated in this work. To describe the impurity spreading and the plasma response self-consistently, fluid equations for the particle, momentum and energy balances of various plasma components are solved by reducing them to ordinary differential equations for the time evolution of several parameters characterizing the solution in principal details: the magnitudes of plasma density and plasma temperatures in the regions of impurity localization and the spatial scales of these regions. The results of calculations for plasma conditions typical in tokamak experiments with impurity injection are presented. A new mechanism for the condensation phenomenon and formation of cold dense plasma structures is proposed.