New method to design stellarator coils without the winding surface
Abstract
Finding an easy-to-build coils set has been a critical issue for stellarator design for decades. Conventional approaches assume a toroidal "winding" surface. We'll investigate if the existence of winding surface unnecessarily constrains the optimization, and a new method to design coils for stellarators is presented. Each discrete coil is represented as an arbitrary, closed, one-dimensional curve embedded in three-dimensional space. A target function to be minimized that covers both physical requirements and engineering constraints is constructed. The derivatives of the target function are calculated analytically. A numerical code, named FOCUS, has been developed. Applications to a simple configuration, the W7-X, and LHD plasmas are presented.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1705.02333,
title = {New method to design stellarator coils without the winding surface},
author = {Caoxiang Zhu and Stuart R. Hudson and Yuntao Song and Yuanxi Wan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.02333},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
25 pages, 11 figures, submitted to Nuclear Fusion on May 24