VALIDATION OF NUMERICAL CODES FOR THE ANALYSIS OF PLASMA DISCHARGES

Electromagnetic aspects in the design of ITER-like reactors call for a n extensive use of complex and advanced numerical codes. For this reas on a strong attention has been paid within the NET-Team to the code de velopment. In particular, through a cooperation with some Italian univ ersities, during the last years a number of numerical procedures were developed and integrated. In order to assess the code reliability and to gain confidence on their predictions for next generation ITER-like reactors, the validation of the codes against experiments has to be co nsidered as a strict requirement. Aim of this paper is to give a compr ehensive presentation of this problem in the light of the results of a campaign of validation runs. The main outcome of this work is that th e computational procedures, which have been developed for the NET proj ect and then extensively used also for ITER studies, can be considered as experimentally validated in a sufficiently wide range of cases of interest. In particular, computed values are compared with experimenta l measurements made during some typical ASDEX-Upgrade discharges. From the electromagnetic point of view, many features of this machine are common to the ITER concept, so that the results of the validation can reasonably be extended to the ITER case.