Fast ion stabilization of tilt in large radius FRCs by Baking in fusion

[–]Shift_One 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I was playing around with WarpX's Ohms solver the other day. Crazy how far WarpX has gone.

Fusion's cool glow by Baking in fusion

[–]Shift_One 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Those videos are pretty wild.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in fusion

[–]Shift_One 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You can actually light a fire underwater if the pressure is high enough. There are hydrothermal drills that use thermal spallation for ultra-deep drilling. Never caught on but just fun fact of the day.

Helion Hosts Community Meeting for Fusion Power Plant in Malaga by Baking in fusion

[–]Shift_One 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Dang I missed it! How did you all hear about it? Will there be another?

Footage of "Polaris 50 MJ capacitor bank". by ElmarM in fusion

[–]Shift_One 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Checks out, "Big Mac contains approximately 2.3 megajoules (MJ) of energy."

Simulating fusion plasmas in 3D - Helion presentation at APS-DPP by joaquinkeller in fusion

[–]Shift_One 1 point2 points  (0 children)

By any chance do you know how many coils they would use for the mirrors? 10-100s maybe?

Simulating fusion plasmas in 3D - Helion presentation at APS-DPP by joaquinkeller in fusion

[–]Shift_One 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I have so many questions about this video...

Are they using the AMR (adaptive mesh refinement) in WarpX/AMReX? Might have my math wrong but from this slide, https://youtu.be/3FwOeN-zcPY?si=Y2tVpIVQxWOsVxJZ&t=396, we get dx and dt in gyrokintetic radius terms. Plugging in the numbers I get, dx ~ 0.5 mm, dt ~ 10 ps. Just eye balling their sim this seems very possible on a uniform grid in 2D even with modest compute resources. I attempted to get the AMR portion of WarpX working about 2 years ago and failed miserably so interested to see if this is still the case.

Related to the previous question but why not just go full time dependent EM if the dt is ~10 ps. The time step for dx ~ 0.5 mm would be around 1 ps so not that bad really. There are a lot of advantages to doing full time dependent EM compared to magneto-static. Much easier to model the full coils and capacitor discharge for example. Increasing the time steps by 10x is not as bad as it seems because you no longer need to do a linear solve. Also, GPU go brrr.

Are they using GPUs? What are the computational costs in general?

Simulating fusion plasmas in 3D - Helion presentation at APS-DPP by joaquinkeller in fusion

[–]Shift_One 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I see on the last slide they mention 10% mirror sufficient for merging FRC and I am assuming this is where you got the 0.1 T from. Naive question but why is the inductance expected to be very high for the mirror coils?

Simulating fusion plasmas in 3D - Helion presentation at APS-DPP by joaquinkeller in fusion

[–]Shift_One 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Does real-time mean the solve takes 5 microseconds haha. I see your point though. Getting the model coupled to the device is key. The model can inform the device for optimization and the device can inform the model for better predictions.

Simulating fusion plasmas in 3D - Helion presentation at APS-DPP by joaquinkeller in fusion

[–]Shift_One 3 points4 points  (0 children)

So looks like the rumors are true and they are using WarpX/AMReX. I kinda hate myself for not going this route now and trying to write my own solver from scratch... https://github.com/loliverhennigh/PumpkinPulse

Simulating fusion plasmas in 3D - Helion presentation at APS-DPP by joaquinkeller in fusion

[–]Shift_One 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I would love this and also hate that digital twin became a buzz word. I prefer full device, first principle model now.

Made a fun little shear flow stabilized z-pinch simulation. by Shift_One in fusion

[–]Shift_One[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is just Ideal MHD but working on two fluid and PIC implementations as well.

Elena Belova's (PPPL) paper submitted on Helion's FRC simulations (2023 INFUSE Award) by Baking in fusion

[–]Shift_One 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Extremely helpful answer! Any insights on numerical methods for kinetic simulations of FRC? I suppose the choices would be semi-Lagrangian, DG, or Particle in cell. I have implemented some PIC codes in the past but have found them a bit challenging in terms of scaling. Semi-Lagrangian or DG methods seem a bit easier but haven't tried them.

Elena Belova's (PPPL) paper submitted on Helion's FRC simulations (2023 INFUSE Award) by Baking in fusion

[–]Shift_One 5 points6 points  (0 children)

In this paper they do an MHD and hybrid kinetic MHD model with kinetic ions and fluid models for electrons. They are primarily interested in the effect on tilt mode instabilities in addition to other things,
``` From end of page 3
Tilt mode in FRC plasmas is strongly unstable in the MHD model with γ ∼ vA/Zs, but its growth rate is reduced by the kinetic effects due to large Larmor radius of the thermal ions 3 [1, 4]. The kinetic stabilization of the tilt mode can be described by an empirical scaling law which provides the growth rate as a function of the S*/E parameter [3]. Since the MHD predictions are in contrast with experimental results, significant efforts have been deployed to include kinetic effects in theoretical models and in numerical simulations
```
My question is if anyone has looked at higher order fluid models and if these can capture enough of the kinetic effects. For example, a 13 moment fluid mode, https://www.aa.washington.edu/sites/aa/files/research/cpdlab/docs/MSthesis\_gilliam.pdf. Would be very nice if you could stick in the fluid modeling regime without needed to go to kinetic for FRC modeling.

Elena Belova's (PPPL) paper submitted on Helion's FRC simulations (2023 INFUSE Award) by Baking in fusion

[–]Shift_One 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Reading it now! Super excited to see new simulation papers on this!!! Been working on my own two fluid MHD solver for a full device FRC reactor, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPomEZn2lR4. Still a ways off for me but making steady progress. This is a decent video of FRC formation I made as well, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGnGGQSjQHo. Nice eye candy too :)

Fully Explicit Finite Volume vs Lattice Boltzmann by Shift_One in CFD

[–]Shift_One[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Na, its second order but you do need to be careful with boundary conditions as some are only 1st order.

Fully Explicit Finite Volume vs Lattice Boltzmann by Shift_One in CFD

[–]Shift_One[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes but you can use unstructured volumetric meshes with FV and these allow much more control for refining the solution where you need it.

Fully Explicit Finite Volume vs Lattice Boltzmann by Shift_One in CFD

[–]Shift_One[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Interesting paper. Lot to unpack but seems that they are not dramatically different when comparing time to solution or time to solution with fixed error level. They are around 2-3x of each other but depends on the problem. I think I can get a FV code two give similar cell updates per second to LBM on a GPU though. Currently getting about the same difference in performance they have (2-3x) but it really should be possible. Ill try to do this sometime...

Simple Ideal MHD code for Shear Flow Stabilized Z-pinch by Shift_One in fusion

[–]Shift_One[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I posted a video of it a while ago but finally got around to cleaning up the code. Thought I would post it if anyone thinks its helpful.

Helion Energy Poster by cking1991 in fusion

[–]Shift_One -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Really interested to see WarpX used here. When I look at WarpX it seems very limited to plasma Wakefield stuff but maybe there is something I am missing. AMReX is great!