Multi-Machine, Multi-Constraint Validation of TGLF on Alcator C-Mod and ASDEX Upgrade

The turbulent transport code TGLF [Staebler PoP 2016] is validated on 11 plasma discharges on Alcator C-Mod and ASDEX Upgrade. Traditional transport validation studies focus on a single plasma discharge, due to the computational resources required. Increasingly accurate reduced models such as TGLF and optimization frameworks such as VITALS [Rodriguez-Fernandez FST 2018], however, enable another approach to validation. This study employs heat fluxes, electron temperature fluctuations from CECE [Creely RSI 2018], and perturbative diffusivity [Creely NF 2016] to validate TGLF on 11 discharges on two machines. This study is motivated by recent results suggesting that multi-scale gyrokinetics is required to accurately model some plasmas, while ion-scale models are sufficient for others [Howard PoP 2016, Creely NF Sub.]. To that end, TGLF is validated in both ion- and multi-scale configurations. Multi-scale simulations agree with experiment in all cases. The ratio of the high-k to low-k peak linear growth rates correlates with the importance of multi-scale effects.