Publications

* partially supported by Simons Foundation

107 Publications
2021

A formal series transformation to Birkhoff–Gustavson normal form is obtained for toroidal magnetic field configurations in the neighborhood of a magnetic axis. Bishop's rotation minimizing coordinates are used to obtain a local orthogonal frame near the axis in which the metric is diagonal, even if the curvature has zeros. We treat the cases of…

* Partially Supported
2020

It is shown that the magnetic-field coils of a stellarator can, at least in principle, be substantially simplified by the use of permanent magnets. Such magnets cannot create toroidal magnetic flux but they can be used to shape the plasma and thus to create poloidal flux and rotational transform, thereby easing the requirements on the magnetic…

2021

Combined plasma–coil optimization approaches for designing stellarators are discussed and a new method for calculating free-boundary equilibria for multiregion relaxed magnetohydrodynmics (MRxMHD) is proposed. Four distinct categories of stellarator optimization, two of which are novel approaches, are the fixed-boundary optimization, the…

Keywords
2019

Analytic scaling relations are derived for a phenomenological model of the plasmoid instability in an evolving current sheet, including the effects of reconnection outflow. Two scenarios are considered, where the plasmoid instability can be triggered either by an injected initial perturbation or by the natural noise of the system (here…

Keywords
* Partially Supported
2020

The stepped-pressure equilibrium code (SPEC) (Hudson et al 2012 Phys. Plasmas 19, 112 502) is extended to enable free-boundary multi-region relaxed magnetohydrodynamic (MRxMHD) equilibrium calculations. The vacuum field surrounding the plasma inside an arbitrary 'computational boundary', ${\mathcal{D}}$, is computed, and the virtual-casing…

2019

A direct construction of equilibrium magnetic fields with toroidal topology at arbitrary order in the distance from the magnetic axis is carried out, yielding an analytical framework able to explore the landscape of possible magnetic flux surfaces in the vicinity of the axis. This framework can provide meaningful analytical insight on the…

* Partially Supported
2021

Over the last decade, a variational principle based on a generalisation of Taylor’s relaxation, referred to as multi-region relaxed magnetohydrodynamics (MRxMHDs) has been developed. The numerical solutions of the MRxMHD equilibria have been constructed using the Stepped Pressure Equilibrium Code (SPEC) (Hudson et al 2012 Phys. Plasmas 19…

2019

A method is given to rapidly compute quasisymmetric stellarator magnetic fields for plasma confinement, without the need to call a three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium code inside an optimization iteration. The method is based on direct solution of the equations of magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium and quasisymmetry using Garren and…

* Partially Supported
2018

The confinement of guiding center trajectories in a stellarator is determined by the variation of the magnetic field strength B in Boozer coordinates (r,θ,φ), but B(r,θ,φ) depends on the flux surface shape in a complicated way. Here we derive equations relating B(r,θ,φ) in Boozer coordinates and the…

* Partially Supported
2019

Most quasisymmetric stellarators to date have been designed by numerically optimizing the plasma boundary shape to minimize symmetry-breaking Fourier modes of the magnetic field strength B. At high aspect ratio, a faster approach is to directly construct the plasma shape from the equations of quasisymmetry near the magnetic axis derived…

Fully Supported
2019

Quasisymmetric stellarators are appealing intellectually and as fusion reactor candidates since the guiding center particle trajectories and neoclassical transport are isomorphic to those in a tokamak, implying good confinement. Previously, quasisymmetric magnetic fields have been identified by applying black-box optimization algorithms to…

* Partially Supported
2020

In this paper we follow up on the results from our previous publication (Lobsien et al 2018 Nucl. Fusion 58 106013), where it was found that stellarator coil design optimization can be substantially improved by using a stochastic optimisation approach. In that paper performance was quantified by lower (better) and more narrow (more robust)…

* Partially Supported
2020

Following up on earlier work which demonstrated an improved numerical stellarator coil design optimization performance by the use of stochastic optimization (Lobsien et al., Nucl. Fusion, vol. 58 (10), 2018, 106013), it is demonstrated here that significant further improvements can be made – lower field errors and improved…

* Partially Supported
2018

Recently designed optimized stellarator experiments have suffered from very tight construction tolerances, but some level of deviation of the coil system is unavoidable during fabrication of the coils and assembly of the coil system. In this paper, we present a new approach that incorporates reduced sensitivity to construction tolerances of…

Fully Supported
2019

It is shown that the resistive magnetohydrodynamic stability of a slab force-free current sheet can be calculated using the variational principle of multi-region relaxed magnetohydrodynamics and that the corresponding stability boundary is in exact agreement with linear tearing mode theory.

Keywords
* Partially Supported