Commercially viable fusion reactors have long been the holy grail of clean energy
production. They promise to capture the same physical process as the sun to provide stable, safe energy with no direct carbon emissions. Tokamak reactors are one of the leading reactor designs,
and require heating a Deuterium-Tritium plasma to nearly 150 million Kelvin, roughly 10 times hotter than the Sun’s core. This style of reactor contains the superheated plasma via extreme magnetic fields, as any known material cannot consistently withstand these temperatures. Modelling tokamak plasma presents significant mathematical and computational challenges. The
plasma evolves nonlinearly through high dimensional phase space, making high performance computing simulations necessary. The edge region is particularly difficult to simulate due to high
temperature gradients and complex geometry. In this seminar, I will give an overview of COGENT: a mapped, multiblock, finite volume code designed to simulate plasma in the edge region of a tokamak. I will talk about the foundational physics and computational mathematics involved, as well as the current state of the code and possible future extensions.