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Unstructured mesh tools for magnetically confined fusion system simulations

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Abstract

As fusion simulation codes increasingly account for the full geometric complexity of magnetically confined fusion systems, a need arose to provide tailored unstructured mesh technologies to address the specific needs of fusion plasma simulation codes and their coupling to other physics simulation codes. This paper presents a high level overview of a set of unstructured mesh developments that include; methods to effectively employ manufacturing CAD models in the construction of quality analysis model geometries, specialized mesh generation and adaptation tools; an infrastructure to support parallel particle-in-cell calculation on unstructured meshes; and an infrastructure for coupling of massively parallel mesh-based fusion codes.

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Acknowledgements

The developments reported in this paper were supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computation Program under awards DE-SC0021285 (FASTMath SciDAC Institute) and DE-SC0018275 (Unstructured Mesh Technologies for Fusion Simulation Codes). It was also supported by the Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration Exascale Computing Program, under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357 (Center for Efficient Exascale Discretizations and Whole Device Model Application). Any opinions, findings and conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Energy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Scientific Computation Research Center; Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th St., Troy, NY, 12180, USA

    Mark S. Shephard, Jacob Merson, Onkar Sahni, Angel E. Castillo, Aditya Y. Joshi, Dhyanjyoti D. Nath, Usman Riaz, E. Seegyoung Seol & Cameron W. Smith

  2. Mechanical Engineering, University of North Dakota, 243 Centennial Dr., Grand Forks, ND, 58202, USA

    Chonglin Zhang

  3. Simmetrix Inc., 10 Executive Park Drive, Clifton Park, NY, 12065, USA

    Mark W. Beall, Ottmar Klaas, Rocco Nastasia & Saurabh Tendulkar

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  1. Mark S. Shephard
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Correspondence to Mark S. Shephard.

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Shephard, M.S., Merson, J., Sahni, O. et al. Unstructured mesh tools for magnetically confined fusion system simulations. Engineering with Computers (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00366-024-01976-2

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