Strain Optimization for ReBCO High-Temperature Superconducting Stellarator Coils in SIMSOPT

Abstract

This work provides an optimization mechanism to ensure the compatibility of ReBCO (Rare-earth Barium Copper Oxide) high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tapes with non-planar stellarator coils. ReBCO coils enable higher field strengths and operating temperatures for the magnet systems of future fusion reactors but are sensitive to strain due to their brittle, ceramic functional layer. We have implemented a metric to optimize strain on stellarator coils made from ReBCO superconductors into the stellarator optimization framework \texttt{SIMSOPT} and used it to design new stellarator coil configurations. To ensure structural integrity of coils wound with HTS tape, we introduce a penalty on binormal curvature and torsion along a coil. It can be used to optimize the orientation of the winding path for a given coil filament or to jointly optimize orientation and coil filament. We apply the strain optimization to three cases. For the EPOS (Electrons and Positrons in an Optimized Stellarator) design, we combine the strain penalty with an objective for quasisymmetry into a single-stage optimization; this enables us to find a configuration with excellent quasisymmetry at the smallest possible size compatible with the use of ReBCO tape. For CSX (Columbia Stellarator eXperiment), in addition to HTS strain, we add a penalty to prevent net tape rotation to ease the coil winding process. If the strain is calculated for a coil at reactor scale, we find a considerable variation of the binormal and torsional strain over the cross section of the large winding pack (0.5\,m x 0.5\,m). By exploiting the overall orientation of the winding pack as a degree of freedom, we can reduce binormal and torsional strains below limits for every ReBCO stack.