Honors Theses and Capstones

Date of Award

Spring 2024

Project Type

Senior Honors Thesis

College or School

CEPS

Department

Department of Physics and Astronomy

Program or Major

Physics

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science

First Advisor

Banjamin Chandran

Abstract

Fusion has long been considered the “Holy Grail” of renewable energy, but has not yet seen viability as a commercial power source. With tokamaks like SPARC, NSTX-U, and ITER coming online over the next ten years, there is growing investment in fusion technology by both the public and private sector. If these tokamaks reach or exceed their scientific aims, further investment in fusion and new tokamak designs are expected. The first step in designing a tokamak is choosing a good plasma equilibrium, which is described by the Grad-Shafranov equation. This work presents a successive over-relaxation routine to solve the Grad-Shafranov equation. This work also presents the implementation of additional routines to modify the successive over-relaxation code into a free-boundary Grad-Shafranov equation solver. The successive over-relaxation routine showed good agreement with analytical solutions. Ultimately, this tool serves as a good starting point for testing plasma equilibria for a given coil and solenoid configuration in the early design phase of tokamaks.

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