Publications by Moahan Murugappan

Collisional effects on positive and negative triangularity through local and global temperature gradient-driven and flux-driven gyrokinetic simulations

Laurent Villard, Stephan Brunner, Moahan Murugappan, Giovanni Di Giannatale

In this work, we explore the effects of collisions on turbulent transport, focusing on two different TCV magnetic equilibria featuring positive and negative triangularity. The investigation is conducted using gyrokinetic modeling. Both gradient-driven and ...

2025

Global electromagnetic gyrokinetic simulations of internal transport barriers in reversed-shear tokamaks

Laurent Villard, Stephan Brunner, Justin Richard Ball, Moahan Murugappan, Giovanni Di Giannatale, Arnas Volcokas

Internal transport barriers (ITB) form through turbulence suppression, often observed when the safety factor profile exhibits an off-axis minimum. This work aims at improving our understanding of the conditions enabling the development of an ITB, using a m ...

2025

Gyrokinetic simulations of turbulence in magnetic fusion plasmas using a delta-f PIC scheme with evolving background

Moahan Murugappan

Using the GKEngine code which simulates an electrostatic plasma with adiabatic electron response under a sheared-slab geometry, an attempt at developing a hybrid approach between the delta-f and full-f schemes to describe plasma profiles exhibiting high fl ...

EPFL2024

Verification of the Fourier-enhanced 3D finite element Poisson solver of the gyrokinetic full-f code PICLS

Laurent Villard, Stephan Brunner, Moahan Murugappan, Alberto Bottino

We introduce and derive the Fourier -enhanced 3D electrostatic field solver of the gyrokinetic full -f PIC code PICLS. The solver makes use of a Fourier representation in one periodic direction of the domain to make the solving of the system easily paralle ...

Elsevier2024

Gyrokinetic flux-driven simulations in mixed TEM/ITG regime using a delta-f PIC scheme with evolving background

Laurent Villard, Stephan Brunner, Moahan Murugappan, Giovanni Di Giannatale

In the context of global gyrokinetic simulations of turbulence using a particle-in-cell framework, verifying the delta-f assumption with a fixed background distribution becomes challenging when determining quasi-steady state profiles corresponding to given ...

American Institute of Physics (AIP)2024

System size scaling of triangularity effects on global temperature gradient-driven gyrokinetic simulations

Laurent Villard, Stephan Brunner, Moahan Murugappan, Giovanni Di Giannatale

In this work, we explore the triangularity effects on turbulent transport employing global gyrokinetic simulations performed with the ORB5 code. Numerous experiments on the Tokamak á Configuration Variable (TCV) and, more recently, on the DIII-D machine, h ...

2024

Gyrokinetic simulations of turbulence and zonal flows driven by steep profile gradients using a delta-f approach with an evolving background Maxwellian

Laurent Villard, Stephan Brunner, Moahan Murugappan, Alberto Bottino, Ben McMillan

Long global gyrokinetic turbulence simulations are particularly challenging in situations where the system deviates strongly from its initial state and when fluctuation levels are high, for example, in strong gradient regions. For particle-in-cell simulati ...

2022

Moment approach of the multi-species non-linear Coulomb collision operator adapted to particle-in-cell codes

Laurent Villard, Stephan Brunner, Emmanuel Lanti, Moahan Murugappan, Noé Thomas Elie Ohana, Claudio Gheller

In this article an approximated version of the multi-species, non-linear Coulomb collision operator is derived via the use of a truncated moment expansion of the distribution function to compute the Rosenbluth potentials. The evolution of the distribution ...

2021