Section: New Software and Platforms

Free boundary equilibrium codes

CEDRES++

Participants : Jacques Blum, Cédric Boulbe, Blaise Faugeras, Holger Heumann, Sylvain Bremond [CEA] , Eric Nardon [CEA] .

In Tokamaks, at the slow resistive diffusion time scale, the magnetic configuration in the plasma can be described by the MHD equilibirum equations inside the plasma and the Maxwell equations outside. Moreover, the magnetic field is often supposed not to depend on the azimutal angle.

Under this assumption of axisymmetric configuration, the equilibrium in the whole space reduces to solving a 2D problem in which the magnetic field in the plasma is described by the well known Grad Shafranov equation. The unknown of this problem is the poloidal magnetic flux. The P1 finite element code CEDRES++ solves this free boundary equilibrium problem in direct and inverse mode. The direct problem consists in the computation of the magnetic configuration and of the plasma boundary, given a plasma current density profile and the total current in each poloidal field coils (PF coils). The aim of the inverse problem is to find currents in the PF coils in order to best fit a given plasma shape. An evolutive version of the code has also been recently developed. This version takes into account the circuit equations in the PF coils. These equations give a time dependent relation between the voltages, the total current in the coils and the time derivative of the magnetic flux. Induced currents in passive structures like the vacuum vessel are also considered in this dynamic equilibrium problem. This new version of the code is an important tool for plasma scenario development and Tokamak design studies. A version of CEDRES++ is avalaible in the environment of the european projet Eurofusion WPCD.

FEEQS.M

Participant : Holger Heumann.

FEEQS.M (Finite Element Equilibrium Solver in Matlab) is a MATLAB implementation of the numerical methods in [15] to solve equilibrium problems for toroidal plasmas. Direct and inverse problems for both the static and transient formulations of plasma equilibrium can be solved. FEEQS.M exploits MATLAB‘s evolved sparse matrix methods and uses heavily the vectorization programming paradigm, which results in running times comparable to C/C++ implementations. FEEQS.M complements the production code CEDRES++ in being considered as fast prototyping test bed for computational methods for equilibrium problems. This includes aspects of numerics such as improved robustness of the Newton iterations or optimization algorithms for inverse problems. The latest developments aim at incorporating the resistive diffusion equation.