MIRA: a multi-physics approach to designing a fusion power plant

Fusion systems codes (SCs) are deployed to produce the baseline of the European fusion power reactor (DEMO) within its conceptual design. A DEMO baseline is mostly defined by a radial/vertical reactor sketch and major reactor parameters, such as fusion and net electric power, magnetic fields, and plasma burn time. A baseline shall also meet a set of prescribed reactor requirements, constraints, and architectural features. According to the conceptual design workflow implemented within the EU-DEMO programme, the output from the SC is transferred to the detailed physics and engineering design codes. Presently-available fusion SCs rely on rather basic physics and engineering models (mostly at zero or one-dimensional level). The design codes, instead, are very detailed but run on much longer computing times. To fill the gap between systems and design codes, the multi-fidelity systems/design tool modular integrated reactor analysis (MIRA)-has been recently developed. MIRA incorporates the physics and the engineering insights of the utmost domains of tokamak reactors and relies on a higher spatial resolution, spanning from 1D up to 3D modelling frames. The MIRA approach has been applied to the DEMO 2017 baseline, generated by the EU reference SC PROCESS and used as input to MIRA. In the paper, the architectural and mathematical insights of the MIRA package are described, along with an EU-DEMO 2017 baseline analysis.