Modeling transport in toroidal plasmas: Status and issues

The scope and detail of physics contained in computational models for fluid (density, momentum, energy) transport in toroidal plasmas have steadily increased during the past two decades. There has been considerable success in the development and verification of models for sources and sinks of particles, energy, momentum, and magnetic flux. Transport codes have collectively become very useful tools in interpreting experimental data and in providing guidance for new experiments. However, a more thorough understanding of the fundamental transport processes of magnetically confined plasmas and development of improved computational models are needed to enhance the predictive capabilities of transport codes. It is argued that fluid transport modeling by itself cannot lead to a complete understanding of transport - there must be a very strong collaboration among theory, experiment, and modeling on both the fluid and kinetic levels.