DESC computes 3D MHD equilibria by solving the force balance equations. It can also be used for perturbation analysis and sensitivity studies to see how the equilibria change as input parameters are varied.
The theoretical approach and numerical methods used by DESC are presented in these papers [1] [2] [3] [4] and documented at Theory. Please cite our work if you use DESC!
| [1] | Dudt, D. & Kolemen, E. (2020). DESC: A Stellarator Equilibrium Solver. [Physics of Plasmas] [pdf] |
| [2] | Panici, D. et al (2022). The DESC Stellarator Code Suite Part I: Quick and accurate equilibria computations. [arxiv] [pdf] |
| [3] | Conlin, R. et al. (2022). The DESC Stellarator Code Suite Part II: Perturbation and continuation methods. [arxiv] [pdf] |
| [4] | Dudt, D. et al. (2022). The DESC Stellarator Code Suite Part III: Quasi-symmetry optimization. [arxiv] [pdf] |
The easiest way to install DESC is from pypi: pip install desc-opt
For more detailed instructions on installing DESC and its dependencies, see Installation.
The code is run using the syntax desc <path/to/input_file> and the full list of command line options are given in Command Line Interface. (Note that you may have to prepend the command with python -m)
DESC requires an input file to specify the equilibrium and solver options, and can also accept VMEC input files.
Refer to Inputs for documentation on how to format the input file.
The equilibrium solution is output in a HDF5 binary file, whose format is detailed in Outputs.
As an example usage, to use DESC to solve for the equilibrium of the high-beta, D-shaped plasma described with the DSHAPE input file, the command from the DESC directory is
desc -p examples/DESC/DSHAPE
Where the -p flag tells DESC to plot the results once it finishes.
- desc contains the source code including the main script and supplemental files. Refer to the API documentation for details on all of the available functions and classes.
- docs contains the documentation files.
- examples contains example input files along with corresponding VMEC solutions.
- tests contains routines for automatic testing.