Approaches to modeling of plasmas containing impurity at arbitrary concentration

A new approximate method to modeling of two-ion-species plasmas with arbitrary concentration of impurity is developed. It based on the usage of equations for the electron density and the ratio of the ion species densities as new dependent variables. In contrast to motion equations for the ion mass velocities used normally, those for the new variables have a singularity at the Debye sheath only, as in the case of a one species plasma. Computations for the most critical situations of weak and intermediate friction between species due to Coulomb collisions reproduce nearly perfectly the results got by solving the original equations, however within a calculation time reduced by a factor of 102–103. In the case of strong friction, where ions' velocities are very close each other, the normal procedure does not converge at all, but the new one, being precise in this limit, operates very reliably. Calculations are done for conditions typical in the linear device PSI-2, with deuterium plasmas seeded by neon impurity. For fixed electron and ion temperatures a critical density of impurity atoms is found, at which the electron density grows without limits. Such a catastrophic behavior does not occur if the electron and ion heat balances are taken into account to calculate the temperature profiles self-consistently.