Investigation of the sensitivity of engineering performance metrics to the plasma profiles for the ARC reactor.

The assessment of the fusion reactor design requires multi-physics high-fidelity modeling that characterizes the system's performance under design conditions. A complete system modeling environment is needed to streamline the design assessment and optimization. We coupled a core and edge plasma transport simulator (IPS-FASTRAN) and a general-purpose neutron and gamma transport code (MCNP) to explore the sensitivity of engineering quantities to various plasma profile characteristics. This is a part of a bigger effort for a full device modeling environment, FERMI.



The affordable, robust, compact (ARC) reactor design was selected for this study. The ARC design, with its rare-earth barium copper oxide magnets, allows for a compact design which significantly lowers the investment cost. However, design compactness increases the particle and heat fluxes which poses an extreme engineering challenge.



We used a 3D CAD geometry for the fusion neutron transport with fine-resolution tetrahedral mesh tallies to observe the localized wall loading trends along the reactor wall with the changes to the plasma profiles and MHD equilibrium calculated by the IPS-FASTRAN modeling. It has been shown that the plasma profile shape can influence the localized wall loading by up to 10% but maintain the global design performance, such as the tritium breeding ratio. The tradeoff between the plasma performance and localized wall loading will be discussed to optimize the triangularity and elongation of the plasma shape.