Comparison benchmark between tokamak simulation code and TokSys for Chinese Fusion Engineering Test Reactor vertical displacement control design

Vertical displacement event (VDE) is a big challenge to the existing tokamak equipment and that being designed. As a Chinese next-step tokamak, the Chinese Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) has to pay attention to the VDE study with full-fledged numerical codes during its conceptual design. The tokamak simulation code (TSC) is a free boundary time-dependent axisymmetric tokamak simulation code developed in PPPL, which advances the MHD equations describing the evolution of the plasma in a rectangular domain. The electromagnetic interactions between the surrounding conductor circuits and the plasma are solved self-consistently. The TokSys code is a generic modeling and simulation environment developed in GA. Its RZIP model treats the plasma as a fixed spatial distribution of currents which couple with the surrounding conductors through circuit equations. Both codes have been individually used for the VDE study on many tokamak devices, such as JT-60U, EAST, NSTX, DIII-D, and ITER. Considering the model differences, benchmark work is needed to answer whether they reproduce each other's results correctly. In this paper, the TSC and TokSys codes are used for analyzing the CFETR vertical instability passive and active controls design simultaneously. It is shown that with the same inputs, the results from these two codes conform with each other.