High fidelity turbulence-based prediction of stellarator reactor performance

As we progress down the stellarator path to a fusion pilot plant (FPP), a key need is the capability to accurately and robustly predict the equilibrium profiles (and hence fusion performance) attainable by a given FPP design configuration. In this work, we use high fidelity transport simulations to predict the energy confinement and fusion performance of optimized stellarator configurations under development as FPP concepts by Type One Energy Group, Inc. This is accomplished using the recently-developed Trinity3D (T3D) transport modeling framework. T3D leverages multi-scale gyrokinetic theory to efficiently predict macro-scale density and temperature profiles subject to micro-scale turbulent and neoclassical losses, in addition to sources from auxiliary fueling and heating, alpha heating, radiation losses, and collisional energy exchange. For this study, the turbulent fluxes are computed from first-principles nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations using the GX code, and neoclassical fluxes are computed using the SFINCS code.