Date of Award:

5-2013

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Physics

Committee Chair(s)

Eric D Held

Committee

Eric D Held

Committee

W. Farrell Edwards

Committee

D. Mark Riffe

Committee

James T. Wheeler

Committee

Joseph Koebbe

Abstract

A code that solves the coupled electron drift kinetic and temperature equations has been written to study the effects of collisionality and particle trapping on temperature equilibration along magnetic field lines. A Chapman-Enskog-like approach is adopted with the time-dependent distribution function written as the sum of a dynamic Maxwellian and a kinetic distortion expanded in Legendre polynomials. The drift kinetic equation is solved on a discrete grid in normalized speed, and an FFT algorithm is used to treat the onedimensional spatial domain along the magnetic field. The dependence of the steady-state temperature on collisionality and magnetic well depths is discussed in detail. As collisionality decreases (increasing background temperature), temperature variations decrease. As magnetic well depth increases (at fixed collisionality), temperature variations along the field line increase.

Checksum

85f8a52da126080d8c0c4c4990daa52c

Comments

This work made publicly available electronically on 5/2013

Download

Share

COinS

Copyright for this work is retained by the student. If you have any questions regarding the inclusion of this work in the Digital Commons, please email us at .