Towards joint optimization of stellarator coils and support structures

The support structure is an integral part of the design of nuclear fusion reactors, especially 3D stellarator devices.

A practical reactor's coils and support structures must have three competing qualities: an accurate magnetic field for good confinement, sufficient rigidity to protect the brittle high-temperature superconductor (HTS) from damage, and a simple geometry for low-cost construction.

In existing devices, the coil geometry is often optimized without knowledge of the support structures' design and the coils' true stress and deformation.

The support structures are then placed by hand through repeated finite element analyses (FEA) until engineering requirements are met.

This makes the structural design of stellarator coil systems lengthy and labor-intensive.

Using new developments in differentiable structural mechanics, we present coil-fem, an open-source software tool that integrates support differentiable FEA into the stellarator coil optimization loop.

It enables the integrated optimization of coil geometry and support clamp locations to simultaneously reduce magnetic field errors and stresses in the coil body.

We also present the first combined coil-support optimization in the stellarator literature.

Using a penalty term based on coil-fem, we produced a coil set with 2.4x lower RMS von Mises stress and similar field error compared to an unoptimized baseline.