BLUEMIRA: a modular, open-source framework for designing tokamak fusion reactors
Matti Coleman, James Cook, Fabrizio Franza, Ivan Maione, Simon Mcintosh, Hudson Baker, Alexander Ian Blair, Shail Desai, Oliver Funk, Georgina Graham, et al.
As efforts across the world to deliver fusion power enter their respective conceptual design stages, many begin to encounter the difficulties of generating complete designs, evaluating them, performing trade-off studies, and comparing different alternatives. Many organisations successfully use fusion reactor systems codes with low-fidelity formulations of the critical physics and engineering aspects to inform the initial design stage and steer them towards a region of the design space they consider attractive, but struggle to explore the design space in more depth. This work is an overview of the open-source tokamak reactor design framework, BLUEMIRA, built from the BLUEPRINT [1, 2] and MIRA [3, 4] codes, which goes beyond the “classical” systems code paradigm and enables the user to parameterise their reactor designs at higher fidelity. Reactor design workflows ranging from 0-D “radial build” design, equilibrium design, to 3-D CAD and automated neutronics analyses can be run within minutes. We present the functionality implemented in the BLUEMIRA code and demonstrate its application to the conceptual design of a conventional aspect ratio fusion reactor, performing an indicative design study over aspect ratio and number of toroidal field coils.
