A method to measure poloidal field coil irregularities in toroidal plasma devices

A ring of accurately placed and matched printed circuit coils is placed at the center of the DIII-D tokamak vacuum vessel, aligned magnetically with the toroidal field and used to measure the nonaxisymmetric magnetic field of each of the 18 poloidal field coils. [Toroidal and poloidal variations can be of mode n and m, respectively, with helical variations of form cos(nφ−mθ).] From the error fields, it is computed that the most irregular poloidal field coil is one of the outer vertical field coils having a shift of 1.9 ±0.2 cm (compared to a diameter of 482 cm), and having an ellipticity 1.0027. All the 18 poloidal field coils together make a resonant, helical, radial error field for m=2, n=1 of about 1.4 × 10−4 of the toroidal field.