Moment-equation methods for calculating neoclassical transport coefficients in general toroidal plasmas

A detailed comparison is made between moment-equation methods presented by H. Sugama and S. Nishimura [Phys. Plasmas 9, 4637 (2002)] and by M. Taguchi [Phys. Fluids B 4, 3638 (1992)] for calculating neoclassical transport coefficients in general toroidal plasmas including nonsymmetric systems. It is shown that these methods can be derived from the drift kinetic equation with the same collision model used for correctly taking account of collisional momentum conservation. In both methods, the Laguerre polynomials of the energy variable are employed to expand the guiding-center distribution function and to obtain the moment equations, by which the radial neoclassical transport fluxes and the parallel flows are related to the thermodynamic forces. The methods are given here in the forms applicable for an arbitrary truncation number of the Laguerre-polynomial expansion so that their accuracies can be improved by increasing the truncation number. Differences between results from the two methods appear when the Laguerre-polynomial expansion is truncated up to a finite order because different weight functions are used in them to derive the moment equations. At each order of the truncation, the neoclassical transport coefficients obtained from the Sugama-Nishimura method show the Onsager symmetry and satisfy the ambipolar-diffusion condition intrinsically for symmetric systems. Also, numerical examples are given to show how the transport coefficients converge with the truncation number increased for the two methods. (c) 2008 American Institute of Physics.