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We present a method for stellarator coil design via gradient-based optimization of the coil-winding surface. The REGCOIL (Landreman 2017 Nucl. Fusion 57 046003) approach is used to obtain the coil shapes on the winding surface using a continuous current potential. We apply the adjoint method to calculate derivatives of the objective function, allowing for efficient computation of analytic gradients while eliminating the numerical noise of approximate derivatives. We are able to improve engineering properties of the coils by targeting the root-mean-squared current density in the objective function. We obtain winding surfaces for W7-X and HSX which simultaneously decrease the normal magnetic field on the plasma surface and increase the surface-averaged distance between the coils and the plasma in comparison with the actual winding surfaces. The coils computed on the optimized surfaces feature a smaller toroidal extent and curvature and increased inter-coil spacing. A technique for visualization of the sensitivity of figures of merit to normal surface displacement of the winding surface is presented, with potential applications for understanding engineering tolerances.
Coil complexity is a critical consideration in stellarator design. The traditional two-step optimization approach, in which the plasma boundary is optimized for physics properties and the coils are subsequently optimized to be consistent with this boundary, can result in plasma shapes which cannot be produced with sufficiently simple coils. To address this challenge, we propose a method to incorporate considerations of coil complexity in the optimization of the plasma boundary. Coil complexity metrics are computed from the current potential solution obtained with the REGCOIL code (Landreman 2017 Nucl. Fusion 57 046003). We compute the local sensitivity of these metrics with respect to perturbations of the plasma boundary using the shape gradient (Landreman & Paul 2018 Nucl. Fusion 58 076023). We extend REGCOIL to compute derivatives of these metrics with respect to parameters describing the plasma boundary. In keeping with previous research on winding surface optimization (Paul et al. 2018 Nucl. Fusion 58 076015), the shape derivatives are computed with a discrete adjoint method. In contrast with the previous work, derivatives are computed with respect to the plasma rather than the winding surface parameters. To further reduce the required resolution, we present a more efficient representation of the plasma surface using a single Fourier series to describe the radial distance from a coordinate axis and a spectrally condensed poloidal angle. This representation is advantageous over the standard cylindrical representation used in the VMEC code (Hirshman & Whitson 1983 The Physics of Fluids 26 3553-3568), as it provides a uniquely defined poloidal angle, eliminating a null space in the optimization of the plasma surface. The resulting shape gradient highlights features of the plasma boundary consistent with simple coils and can be used to couple coil and fixed-boundary optimization.
In recent years many efforts have been undertaken to simplify coil designs for stellarators due to the difficulties in fabricating non-planar coils. The FOCUS code removes the need for a winding surface and represents the coils as arbitrary curves in 3D. In the following work, the implementation of a spline representation for the coils in FOCUS is described, along with the implementation of a new engineering constraint to design coils with a straighter outer section. The new capabilities of the code are shown as an example on HSX, NCSX, and a prototype quasi-axisymmetric reactor-sized stellarator. The flexibility granted by splines along with the new constraint will allow for stellarator coil designs with improved accessibility and simplified maintenance
The condition of omnigenity is investigated, and applied to the near-axis expansion of Garren and Boozer (1991a). Due in part to the particular analyticity requirements of the near-axis expansion, we find that, excluding quasi-symmetric solutions, only one type of omnigenity, namely quasi-isodynamicity, can be satisfied at first order in the distance from the magnetic axis. Our construction provides a parameterization of the space of such solutions, and the cylindrical reformulation and numerical method of Landreman and Sengupta (2018); Landreman et al. (2019), enables their efficient numerical construction.
This paper presents an efficient gradient projection-based method for structural topological optimization problems characterized by a nonlinear objective function which is minimized over a feasible region defined by bilateral bounds and a single linear equality constraint. The specialty of the constraints type, as well as heuristic engineering experiences are exploited to improve the scaling scheme, projection, and searching step. In detail, gradient clipping and a modified projection of searching direction under certain condition are utilized to facilitate the efficiency of the proposed method. Besides, an analytical solution is proposed to approximate this projection with negligible computation and memory costs. Furthermore, the calculation of searching steps is largely simplified. Benchmark problems, including the MBB, the force inverter mechanism, and the 3D cantilever beam are used to validate the effectiveness of the method. The proposed method is implemented in MATLAB which is open-sourced for educational usage.
Sparsity-inducing regularization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning applications, ranging from feature selection to model compression. In this paper, we present a novel stochastic method -- Orthant Based Proximal Stochastic Gradient Method (OBProx-SG) -- to solve perhaps the most popular instance, i.e., the l1-regularized problem. The OBProx-SG method contains two steps: (i) a proximal stochastic gradient step to predict a support cover of the solution; and (ii) an orthant step to aggressively enhance the sparsity level via orthant face projection. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, e.g., Prox-SG, RDA and Prox-SVRG, the OBProx-SG not only converges to the global optimal solutions (in convex scenario) or the stationary points (in non-convex scenario), but also promotes the sparsity of the solutions substantially. Particularly, on a large number of convex problems, OBProx-SG outperforms the existing methods comprehensively in the aspect of sparsity exploration and objective values. Moreover, the experiments on non-convex deep neural networks, e.g., MobileNetV1 and ResNet18, further demonstrate its superiority by achieving the solutions of much higher sparsity without sacrificing generalization accuracy.