Abstract
Omnigenity is a desirable property of toroidal magnetic fields that ensures confinement of trapped particles. Confining charged particles is a basic requirement for any fusion power plant design, but it can be difficult to satisfy with the non-Axisymmetric magnetic fields used by the stellarator approach. Every ideal magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium previously found to approximate omnigenity has been either axisymmetric, quasi-symmetric or has poloidally closed contours of magnetic field strength. However, general omnigenous equilibria are a much larger design space than these subsets. A new model is presented and employed in the DESC stellarator optimization suite to represent and discover the full parameter space of omnigenous equilibria. Although exact omnigenity aside from quasi-symmetry is impossible, these results reveal that excellent particle confinement can be achieved in practice. Examples far from quasi-symmetry with poloidally, helically and toroidally closed contours are attained with DESC and shown to have low neoclassical collisional transport and fast particle losses.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 905900120 |
Journal | Journal of Plasma Physics |
Volume | 90 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Feb 27 2024 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Condensed Matter Physics
Keywords
- fusion plasma
- plasma confinement