Closed magnetic confinement
Closed-field devices confine the plasma on nested toroidal flux surfaces, so charged particles stream along field lines that never leave the vessel. The tokamak adds a strong external toroidal field to the poloidal field of a large plasma current; the spherical tokamak does the same at low aspect ratio. Stellarators, heliotrons and torsatrons shape the rotational transform entirely with three-dimensional coils and need no net plasma current. The reversed-field pinch relaxes into a state whose toroidal field reverses near the edge; spheromaks and field-reversed configurations are compact toroids that generate most of their own confining field, the FRC with no toroidal field at all.
Each device core below is the single owner of its reactor family's configuration truth inside the SCPN Reactor Systems research group. Solver mathematics stays in SCPN-Fusion-Core, shared physics and geometry kernels in SCPN Reactor Kernels; a device core consumes them through versioned seams and cannot actuate anything directly.
Device cores in this family
- SCPN-TOKAMAK-CORE · Tokamak · Tokamak Device Configuration Truth Owns the configurations: conventional tokamak, spherical tokamak
- SCPN-STELLARATOR-CORE · Stellarator · Rotating Sections, Owned Truth Owns the configurations: heliotron, stellarator, torsatron
- SCPN-RFP-CORE · Reversed-field pinch · Relaxed-Current Torus, One Identifier Owns the configurations: reversed-field pinch
- SCPN-SPHEROMAK-CORE · Spheromak · Compact Toroid, Self-Generated Field Owns the configurations: spheromak
- SCPN-FRC-CORE · Field-reversed configuration · Prolate Compact Toroid, No Toroidal Field Owns the configurations: field-reversed configuration