Controlling turbulence in present and future stellarators

• Published in: Physical review letters Vol. 113; no. 15; p. 155001
• Main Authors: Xanthopoulos, P, Mynick, H E, Helander, P, Turkin, Y, Plunk, G G, Jenko, F, Görler, T, Told, D, Bird, T, Proll, J H E
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 10-10-2014
• Subjects: Design optimization; Fluid dynamics; Fluid flow; Optimization; Stellarators; Stemming; Turbulence; Turbulent flow
• ISSN: 0031-9007; 1079-7114
• DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.155001

Turbulence is widely expected to limit the confinement and, thus, the overall performance of modern neoclassically optimized stellarators. We employ novel petaflop-scale gyrokinetic simulations to predict the distribution of turbulence fluctuations and the related transport scaling on entire stellarator magnetic surfaces and reveal striking differences to tokamaks. Using a stochastic global-search optimization method, we derive the first turbulence-optimized stellarator configuration stemming from an existing quasiomnigenous design.