Scaling law

Scaling laws are an engineering tool to predict the performance of a system as a function of some significant parameters. Its extended use in magnetic confinement physics reflects the fact that detailed transport calculations or predictions on first principles are difficult in this field. In the latter context, they are mainly used to

• predict the performance of new (larger) devices, such as ITER
• summarize large amounts of experimental data
• make performance comparisons between devices
• make educated guesses at local transport mechanisms

The typical scaling law expression for a (dependent) variable y as a function of some (independent) system variables x₁, x₂,... is:

$y=e^{\alpha _{0}}x_{1}^{\alpha _{1}}x_{2}^{\alpha _{1}}...$

Here, the α_i are the scaling parameters. By taking the logarithm of this expression, it becomes linear and simple (multivariate) linear regression tools can be used to determine the parameters from a set of data. However, a proper analysis requires:

• using dimensionless variables (easily achieved by normalizing all quantities appropriately)
• guaranteeing the (linear) statistical independence of the independent variables (applying, e.g., Principal Component Analysis)

Confinement time scaling

The main performance parameter that is subjected to scaling law analysis is the energy confinement time, τ_E. The following are some of the most-used scalings for tokamaks:

• L-mode scaling (H_89P)
• ELMy H-mode scaling (H_H98(y,2))

For stellarators, a similar scaling has been derived.

Power degradation

One of the remarkable and initially unexpected properties of magnetically confined plasmas is the reduction of the energy confinement time τ_E as the heating power P is increased. Typically:

$\tau _{E}\propto P^{-\alpha }$

where α has a value of 0.6 ± 0.1. The reason for this behaviour has not been fully clarified. However, it seems obvious that an increase of P will lead to an increase of (temperature and density) gradients, and thus an increase of "free energy" available to instabilities and turbulence. This then leads to an increase of transport, producing the observed confinement degradation. This phenomenon is therefore due to plasma self-organisation.