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Constrained stellarator coil curvature optimization with FOCUS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2021

Thomas G. Kruger*
Affiliation:
HSX Laboratory, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA
C. Zhu
Affiliation:
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA
A. Bader
Affiliation:
HSX Laboratory, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA
D. T. Anderson
Affiliation:
HSX Laboratory, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA
L. Singh
Affiliation:
HSX Laboratory, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA
*
Email address for correspondence: tkruger@wisc.edu
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Abstract

Finding less complicated coils that have adequately low field errors is a crucial step in stellarator development. One coil metric that is of high importance is the maximum curvature of the coil centreline, or coil single filament. Conductors cannot be bent below some threshold minimum radius of curvature. High coil curvatures can cause strains to exceed acceptable levels, especially in superconducting coils. We investigate three ways to optimize coil curvature and find that applying penalty functions to the coil curvature solves for coils that have a constrained maximum curvature and low field error. Penalty functions are implemented in FOCUS and coil solutions optimized for an HSX-like ‘plasma boundary’ are presented.

Keywords

Information

Type
Letter
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1. The $({\boldsymbol {B_v} \boldsymbol {\cdot } {\boldsymbol {n}}})/{|\boldsymbol {B_v}|}$ distributions plotted on a half-period of the HSX boundary from coils optimized with our penalty curvature objective function (a) and from coils optimized with a quadratic curvature objective function (b).

Figure 1

Figure 2. (a) The penalty function used in the $f_{\kappa ,3}$ objective function, where the variable $\kappa _i$ is changed to $x$ and the value of $\kappa _0$ is set to $5$. Multiple values of the penalty variable $\alpha$ are plotted. (b) The derivative of this penalty function.

Figure 2

Table 1. Objective function weightings for the four optimization runs. Here $w_{Bn}$, $w_L$ and $w_\kappa$ are the field error, length and curvature objective function weightings, respectively.

Figure 3

Figure 3. Coils optimized for the HSX boundary are shown. HSX coils that are not optimized are plotted in black and are included in both panels. (a) FOCUS coils with no curvature optimization are plotted in blue and FOCUS coils optimized with linear curvature are plotted in red. (b) FOCUS coils optimized with quadratic curvature are plotted in green and FOCUS coils optimized with our penalty curvature objective function are plotted in magenta. Parameter $|\boldsymbol {B_v}|$ from coils with no curvature optimization is plotted on a half-period of the HSX boundary in (a) and $|\boldsymbol {B_v}|$ from coils optimized with our penalty curvature objective function is plotted on a half-period of the HSX boundary in (b). High $|\boldsymbol {B_v}|$ is plotted in black and low $|\boldsymbol {B_v}|$ is plotted in yellow.

Figure 4

Figure 4. Coil curvature is plotted against the length around the fifth coil. HSX coils that are not optimized are plotted in black and are included in both panels. (a) FOCUS coils with no curvature optimization are plotted in blue and FOCUS coils optimized with linear curvature are plotted in red. (b) FOCUS coils optimized with quadratic curvature are plotted in green and FOCUS coils optimized with our penalty curvature objective function are plotted in magenta. The plot in (a) is truncated to a maximum curvature of $65 \ (\textrm {m}^{-1})$. The blue spike that is cut off in (a) extends to a maximum value of $246$.

Figure 5

Table 2. Important coil metrics for the initial HSX coils and four optimization runs are given. The normalized field error objective function is given as $f_{Bn}$. Maximum normalized field error is given as $\max | ({\boldsymbol {B_v} \boldsymbol {\cdot } {\boldsymbol {n}}})/{|\boldsymbol {B_v}|} |$. Maximum curvature is given as $\max \kappa \ (\textrm {m}^{-1})$. Minimum coil-to-coil separation is given as $\min ccsep \ (\textrm {cm})$.