Development of SPARC plasma disruption database through electromagnetic predictive MAXFEA modelling

Abstract

The evaluation of electromagnetic (EM) behaviour of tokamak components under disruption loads and its correlation with vertical instabilities is critical and characterizing the design considerations. This is particularly crucial for high-field and burning plasma experiments such as the SPARC tokamak, the compact prototype currently under construction by Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). The combination of high toroidal magnetic field (12.2 T) and high plasma current (8.7 MA) makes SPARC less tolerant to disruptions than currently operating research devices. In this context, recent efforts have been made to characterize the disruption loads in SPARC by conducting a series of analyses to estimate the EM response of the SPARC vacuum vessel (VV) during a plasma vertical displacement event (VDE). In this paper, the aforementioned analyses are used as starting point for a comprehensive characterization of VDE scenarios. These analyses are utilized to create a database of predictive disruption simulations, serving as synthetic experiments to generate and collect pertinent data for upcoming research studies. In this context, the paper discusses a preliminary description of an innovative VV synthetic displacements diagnostic, designed starting from disruption database, presented here, and by exploiting the MAXFEA-ANSYS combined use methodology as further step. The disruptive plasma scenarios database will be functional in estimating the displacement and strain fields of SPARC components using a limited set of VV indirect displacement measurements and integral plasma observations, such as plasma current and effective plasma position.