Ion cyclotron resonance heating calculation for thermal and fast ions in PTC

Using a quasi-linear wave–particle interaction operator in the guiding center approximation, or by incorporating the wave fields as perturbations in full orbit calculations, the PTC code has recently been extended to simulate the ion cyclotron resonance frequency (ICRF) heating. In this paper, the detailed model implementation and code verification are presented. For the verification of ICRF heating modeling in PTC, two benchmark cases are given: (i) fixing the distribution function and comparing the absorbed power with those from a full-wave solver AORSA and (ii) using the same wave fields to compare the distribution function evolution obtained from PTC with that from the Fokker–Planck equation solver CQL3D. In both cases, good consistency is achieved, and the discrepancies due to the physical or numerical models are discussed. As an application of the newly developed module, the PTC code has been applied to simulate the ICRF and neutral beam injection synergy in the EAST device. In this case, the iterative scheme for solving the distribution function and the wave fields is described in detail.