The possibility to produce power by using magnetically confined fusion is a scientific and technological challenge. The perspective of ITER conveys strong signals to intensify modeling effort on magnetized fusion plasmas. The success of the fusion operation is conditioned by the quality of plasma confinement in the core of the reactor and by the control of plasma exhaust on the wall. Both phenomena are related to turbulent cross-field transport that is at the heart of the notion of magnetic confinement studies, particle and heat losses. The study of edge phenomena is therefore complicated by a particularly complex magnetic geometry.This calls for an improvement of our capacity to develop numerical tools able to reproduce turbulent transport properties reliable to predict particle and energy fluxes on the plasma facing components. This thesis introduces the TOKAM3X fluid model to simulate edge plasma turbulence. A special focus is made on the code Verification and the Validation. It is a necessary step before using a code as a predictive tool. Then new insights on physical properties of the edge plasma turbulence are explored. In particular, the poloidal asymmetries induced by turbulence and observed experimentally in the Low-Field-Side of the devices are investigated in details. Great care is dedicated to the reproduction of the MISTRAL base case which consists in changing the magnetic configuration and observing the impact on parallel flows in the poloidal plane. The simulations recover experimental measurements and provide new insights on the effect of the plasma-wall contact position location on the turbulent features, which were not accessible in experiments.

Nuclear fusion could offer a new source of stable, non-CO2 emitting energy. Today, tokamaks offer the best performance by confining a high temperature plasma by means of a magnetic field. Two of the major technological challenges for the operation of tokamaks are the power extraction and the confinement of plasma over long periods. These issues are associated with the transport of particles and heat, which is determined by turbulence, from the central plasma to the edge zone. In this thesis, we model turbulence in the edge plasma. We study in particular the divertor configuration, in which the central plasma is isolated from the walls by means of an additional magnetic field. This complex magnetic geometry is simulated with the fluid turbulence code TOKAM3X, developed in collaboration between the IRFM at CEA and the M2P2 laboratory of the University of Aix-Marseille.A comparison with simulations in simplified geometry shows a similar intermittent nature of turbulence. Nevertheless, the amplitude of the fluctuations, which has a maximum at the equatorial plane, is greatly reduced near the X-point, where the field lines become purely toroidal, in agreement with the recent experimental data. The simulations in divertor configuration show a significantly higher confinement than in circular geometry. A partial inhibition of the radial transport of particles at the X-point contributes to this improvement. This mechanism is potentially important for understanding the transition from low confinement mode to high confinement mode, the intended operational mode for ITER.

Understanding plasma profile evolution and plasma turbulence are two important aspects of developing a predictive model for edge-plasma in tokamaks and other fusion-related devices. Here they describe results relevant to the L-H transition phenomena observed in tokamaks obtained from two simulations codes which emphasize the two aspects of the problem. UEDGE solves for the two-dimensional (2-D) profiles of a multi-species plasma and neutrals given some anomalous cross-field diffusion coefficients, and BOUT solves for the three-dimensional (3-D) turbulence that gives rise to the anomalous diffusion. These two codes are thus complementary in solving different aspects of the edge-plasma transport problem; ultimately, they want to couple the codes so that UEDGE uses BOUT's turbulence transport results, and BOUT uses UEDGE's plasma profiles with a fully automated iteration procedure. This goal is beyond the present paper; here they show how each aspect of the problem, i.e., profiles and turbulent transport, can contribute to L-H type transitions.

The magnetic confinement in tokamaks is for now the most advanced way towards energy production by nuclear fusion. Both theoretical and experimental studies showed that rotation generation can increase its performance by reducing the turbulent transport in tokamak plasmas. The rotation influence on the heat and particle fluxes is studied along with the angular momentum transport with the quasi-linear gyro-kinetic eigenvalue code QuaLiKiz. For this purpose, the QuaLiKiz code is modified in order to take the plasma rotation into account and compute the angular momentum flux. It is shown that QuaLiKiz framework is able to correctly predict the angular momentum flux including the ExB shear induced residual stress as well as the influence of rotation on the heat and particle fluxes. The different contributions to the turbulent momentum flux are studied and successfully compared against both non-linear gyro-kinetic simulations and experimental data.

A model based on a model which natively contained turbulence and turbulence driven flow. It has been improved to include the diamagnetic effects, the magnetic fluctuations, and in this work, we study the parametric dependencies of the observed L-H transition power threshold with respect to the ion mass. By including the diamagnetic effects in our model, we allow the competition between the drift waves and the interchange instabilities. This competition is here studied using fixed gradient simulation. We show in this work that the diamagnetic effects are stabilizing for a resistivity close to experimental conditions. Electromagnetic effects lead to more unstable modes at realistic resistivities. Moreover, a quasilinear estimation of the turbulent flux is able to qualitatively grasp the competition between the drift waves and the interchange and the behaviour of the nonlinear electrostatic turbulent flux with resistivity and plasma beta. Another parametric dependency of the turbulence is studied, by changing the mass of the isotope. This is known as the isotope effect. We show here that the turbulence is reduced when the ion mass is increased. Finally, the characteristic times of the turbulence are studied.Magnetic fluctuations have a dramatic effect on correlation times of the turbulence, by drastically reducing them. Accounting for these results, we present in this work the auto-generation of a transport barrier with electromagnetic simulations of edge turbulence, when the heat power is higher than a threshold, using flux-driven simulations. We have then changed the isotope, and correspondingly to experiments, the power threshold is lower for higher isotope mass.

Journal of a trip to a GAR encampment in Washington, DC. Very detailed description of his trip to the White House. Includes description of a day spent sight seeing in Cleveland, OH on the return trip to Michigan.