Superconductivity & Particle AcceleratorS 2026

As fusion reactor concepts approach increasing levels of technological maturity, the design of the fusion power plant itself is becoming an important aspect of fusion technology development. Stellarators offer an attractive alternative to tokamaks for fusion power generation; however, their complex three-dimensional magnetic configuration makes their engineering design and optimization substantially more challenging.
This work presents an approach for representing superconducting stellarator coils by a reduced set of scalable parameters suitable for system-level fusion power plant optimization. The approach is based on in-house developed computational tools that transform a magnetic configuration, initially defined by current filaments, into a detailed three-dimensional magnet geometry and subsequently evaluate its key engineering parameters and properties.
A central challenge is the full automation of this analysis chain to enable the evaluation of hundreds of design cases required for system-level optimization. The workflow includes automated three-dimensional CAD geometry generation and finite element method (FEM) calculations, processes that are traditionally performed through substantial manual engineering effort. To achieve the required level of scalability, dedicated algorithms have therefore been developed to automate these steps and establish a computational workflow linking stellarator magnetic configurations with detailed superconducting magnet engineering analysis. Ultimately, this approach enables the exploration of more compact reactor designs, sensitivity studies of key design parameters, and systematic comparison of different design variants, such as high-temperature superconducting (HTS) and low-temperature superconducting (LTS) magnet technologies.