Gyrokinetic Simulations Of Turbulent Impurity Transport In Tokamaks

Understanding impurity transport in the core of tokamak plasmas is central to achieving controlled fusion. Indeed impurities are ubiquitous in these devices and their presence in the core are detrimental to plasma confinement (fuel dilution, Bremsstrahlung). Recently, specific attention was given to the convective mechanism related to the gradient of the toroidal rotation to explain experimental flat/hollow impurity profiles in the plasma core. In this thesis, up-to-date modelling tools (NEO for neoclassical transport and GKW for turbulent transport) including the impact of toroidal rotation are used to study both the neoclassical and turbulent contributions to impurity fluxes. A comparison of the experimental and modelled carbon density peaking factor (R/LnC) is performed for a large number of baseline and hybrid H-mode plasmas (increased confinement regimes) with modest to high toroidal rotation from the European tokamak JET. Confrontation of experimental and modelled carbon peaking factor yields two main results. First roto-diffusion is found to have a nonnegligible impact on the carbon peaking factor at high values of the toroidal rotation frequency gradient. Second, there is a tendency to overpredict the experimental R/LnC in the core inner region where the carbon density profiles are hollow. This disagreement between experimental and modelled R/LnC, closely related to the collisionality, is also observed for the momentum transport channel which hints at a common parallel symmetry breaking mechanism lacking in the simulations.