Thank you! That's why I love HN :-)
Would you happen to know what kind of compute power was required? Was it run on a colleague's PC or workstation or did it require supercomputer time?
Would you happen to know what kind of compute power was required? Was it run on a colleague's PC or workstation or did it require supercomputer time?
By the way, the unusual shapes of the coils can be understood intuitively from this picture: https://imgur.com/a/Bq3ABfQ. A plasma needs to be confined with a magnetic field in order to be heated to extreme temperatures, and a toroidal field (produced by the currents in the red coils) is unstable due to particle orbit drifts. You need to add a twist to the field for it to be stable (using the green coils). But if you unroll the surface of the torus, you can approximate the currents in both green and red coils using the discrete blue coils, and they're easier to build.
[1] https://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.860481 [2] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0029-5515/27/5/018...