Software

SUMMIT is a new software package developed at the University of York which can predict the behaviour of magnetically confined plasmas under the influence of microwave-induced current drive during start-up. A central solenoid is the typical method for driving the initial currents, but these devices take up valuable space in the central column and are vulnerable to neutron irradiation. It has been proposed that future reactors may instead make use of microwave launchers around the outer wall to drive currents, as these are more resistant to radiation and will free up space for the breeding blanket or other components.

This project was a set of brand new tools for working with EPOCH simulations: epydeck for reading/writing input files, sdf-xarray for reading output files into xarray, and epyscan for parameter scans and active learning. We wrote these tools as separate packages in order to facilitate generic workflows, as EPOCH users have fairly diverse needs and this helps avoid tight dependencies and locking users into a rigid workflow.

MacauFOAM is an extension for OpenFOAM for simulating low-temperature plasmas using the particle-in-cell (PIC) method. The code has been used in several publications, and unfortunately is currently closed-source due to the institutional policies.

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.

nc-complex is a lightweight, drop-in extension for netCDF that handles reading and writing complex numbers. Currently there are C and C++ APIs, and it has been integrated into netcdf4-python. A Fortran API is also planned.