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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
In transition: Commercializing fusion power
Commercial fusion power is closer than ever. There are now around 30 U.S. fusion companies, several of which claim to be on track to connect to the grid as early as the 2030s.
Tokamak and laser inertial confinement approaches benefit from decades of research at facilities such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and ITER, with alternative concepts including stellarator, magnetic mirror, and Z-pinch confinement also making notable progress as private and government funding for fusion increases.
Christopher L. Leakeas, Edward W. Larsen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 137 | Number 3 | March 2001 | Pages 236-250
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-A2189
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Fokker-Planck equation is often used to approximate the description of particle transport processes with highly forward-peaked scattering. Pomraning has shown that if the physical scattering kernel is sufficiently dominated by small-angle scattering, then the Fokker-Planck equation is an asymptotic approximation to the linear Boltzmann equation. However, most physically-meaningful scattering kernels contain a sufficient amount of large-angle scattering that the asymptotic criterion is not met. Thus, in many physical problems, solutions of the Fokker-Planck equation are substantially in error. In this paper, Pomraning's asymptotic results are generalized and a new generalized Fokker-Planck (GFP) theory that robustly incorporates large-angle scattering is developed. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the resulting GFP equations are much more accurate than the standard Fokker-Planck equation.