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Main Authors: Nunn, Timothy, Pentland, Kamran, Gopakumar, Vignesh, Buchanan, James
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17189
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author Nunn, Timothy
Pentland, Kamran
Gopakumar, Vignesh
Buchanan, James
author_facet Nunn, Timothy
Pentland, Kamran
Gopakumar, Vignesh
Buchanan, James
contents The tokamak is a world-leading concept for producing sustainable energy via magnetically-confined nuclear fusion. Identifying where to position the magnets within a tokamak, specifically the poloidal field (PF) coils, is a design problem which requires balancing a number of competing economic, physical, and engineering objectives and constraints. In this paper, we show that multi-objective Bayesian optimisation (BO), an iterative optimisation technique utilising probabilistic machine learning models, can effectively explore this complex design space and return several optimal PF coil sets. These solutions span the Pareto front, a subset of the objective space that optimally satisfies the specified objective functions. We outline an easy-to-use BO framework and demonstrate that it outperforms alternative optimisation techniques while using significantly fewer computational resources. Our results show that BO is a promising technique for fusion design problems that rely on computationally demanding high-fidelity simulations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_17189
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bayesian optimisation of poloidal field coil positions in tokamaks
Nunn, Timothy
Pentland, Kamran
Gopakumar, Vignesh
Buchanan, James
Plasma Physics
The tokamak is a world-leading concept for producing sustainable energy via magnetically-confined nuclear fusion. Identifying where to position the magnets within a tokamak, specifically the poloidal field (PF) coils, is a design problem which requires balancing a number of competing economic, physical, and engineering objectives and constraints. In this paper, we show that multi-objective Bayesian optimisation (BO), an iterative optimisation technique utilising probabilistic machine learning models, can effectively explore this complex design space and return several optimal PF coil sets. These solutions span the Pareto front, a subset of the objective space that optimally satisfies the specified objective functions. We outline an easy-to-use BO framework and demonstrate that it outperforms alternative optimisation techniques while using significantly fewer computational resources. Our results show that BO is a promising technique for fusion design problems that rely on computationally demanding high-fidelity simulations.
title Bayesian optimisation of poloidal field coil positions in tokamaks
topic Plasma Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17189