Optimal shape of stellarators for magnetic confinement fusion

TL;DR

This paper formulates and analyzes a shape optimization model for designing coil winding surfaces in stellarators, aiming to improve plasma confinement and manufacturability, and demonstrates its effectiveness through numerical simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive mathematical framework for optimizing stellarator coil surfaces, including existence proofs, shape differentiability, and a numerical solution approach.

Findings

Existence of optimal coil surface shapes established.

Shape differentiability of the cost functional proven.

Numerical simulations demonstrate the method's effectiveness.

Abstract

We are interested in the design of stellarators, devices for the production of controlled nuclear fusion reactions alternative to tokamaks. The confinement of the plasma is entirely achieved by a helical magnetic field created by the complex arrangement of coils fed by high currents around a toroidal domain. Such coils describe a surface called "coil winding surface" (CWS). In this paper, we model the design of the CWS as a shape optimization problem, so that the cost functional reflects both optimal plasma confinement properties, through a least square discrepancy, and also manufacturability, thanks to geometrical terms involving the lateral surface or the curvature of the CWS. We completely analyze the resulting problem: on the one hand, we establish the existence of an optimal shape, prove the shape differentiability of the criterion, and provide the expression of the differential in a workable form. On the other hand, we propose a numerical method and perform simulations of optimal stellarator shapes. We discuss the efficiency of our approach with respect to the literature in this area.