Published: Sep 10, 2024 by Liam Pattinson
Project info
Pyloidal is a small utility library which may be used to perform tokamak coordinate transformations. A wide range of coordinate conventions are used throughout the MCF plasma physics software ecosystem, so it is often necessary to convert the outputs from one software package to match the convention used by another. The conventions themselves are formalised and assigned a unique identifier by the tokamak COordinate COnventionS (COCOS). Pyloidal is capable of both converting from one COCOS convention to another, or determining which convention is currently in use. In cases where the convention is ambiguous, Pyloidal returns all possibilities.
This functionality was needed by Pyrokinetics in order to convert equilibria from G-EQDSK files into consistent coordinate conventions. The basic algorithms were available in OMAS, but it seemed wasteful to import such a large library, itself with many dependencies, for the sake of just two functions. Rather than re-implementing these functions in Pyrokinetics directly, we decided to create this small spin-off library so that other projects may also make use of them.
The feature set of Pyloidal is currently very small, but other utilities may be added in future if the need arises.