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Abstract ST-E1 is Tokamak Energy’s commercially competitive fusion power plant design featuring a lifetime high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnet cage, which has completed its pre-concept design stage. A central challenge at the pre-concept stage is the need to iteratively and consistently integrate the development of the magnet cage, core plasma physics, and power-exhaust systems, while avoiding serial design loops and late discovery of infeasible operating scenarios. Accurate representation of inductive current drive is particularly critical, as it tightly couples magnetic equilibria, flux swing, and HTS operational limits across these systems. To address this challenge, a novel integrated workflow has been developed to enable rapid, early-stage iteration during the pre-concept design phase. A key novelty is the deliberate de-coupling of magnetic equilibria generation from coil optimisation and detailed engineering, allowing a broad range of time-dependent operating scenarios to be explored without repeated high-fidelity coil redesign. The workflow combines Metis, a fast 1.5D fixed-boundary modelling tool, with FreeGS, a free-boundary equilibrium solver, to generate flat-top and time-dependent ramp-up scenarios together with the associated flux-swing traces and magnetic equilibria. These outputs are passed to SCOPE, an in-house tool that optimises poloidal field and central solenoid coils based on physics requirements while respecting HTS operational limits. The resulting coil designs are then refined within a dedicated coil-engineering workflow performing higher-fidelity structural, electromagnetic, and HTS analyses. The integrated workflow has been applied to evaluate a wide range of ramp-up, ramp-down, and flat-top scenarios, enabling consistent down-selection of technically achievable operating points across all phases of ST-E1operation. The resulting set of coils and operating scenarios collectively satisfy the full system requirements of the ST-E1 pre-concept design.
Maartensson et al. (Fri,) studied this question.