Quantifying, predicting, and controlling turbulent transport in fusion devices

Determine effective methodologies to quantify, predict, and control turbulent transport in fusion devices so as to enable the design of optimized fusion power plants. This field-level problem concerns establishing reliable approaches for assessing and managing turbulence-driven energy transport that sets confinement performance in reactors.

Background

The paper emphasizes that turbulent transport sets the energy confinement time in fusion devices, directly impacting reactor performance and design. Despite advances in first-principles simulations, routine tasks like optimization or uncertainty quantification require computationally efficient yet reliable models.

The authors address part of this broader challenge by proposing an advanced surrogate scaling law for ETG-driven electron heat flux in tokamak pedestals, including new dependencies on safety factor q and electron beta βe and a quantification of prediction uncertainty via bootstrapping. Nonetheless, the overarching task of quantifying, predicting, and controlling turbulent transport remains a central open problem motivating such model development.