Session KP01 - Poster Session III.
POSTER session, Tuesday afternoon, March 23
Exhibit Hall, GWCC
Recently, a ballooning code (COBRA, R.Sanchez, et al, Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. 43 (1998) 1678) has been developed and intensively benchmarked to evaluate fast and accurately the ideal ballooning stability of general three-dimensional configurations. A combination of matrix and variational techniques coupled to Richardson's extrapolation method is responsible for the noticeable increase in efficiency respect to other existing codes. COBRA has been now included into the optimization suite used in the design and optimization of the QOS concept exploration device planned as part of the US NCSX program (S.~P.~Hirshman, et al, to appear in Phys.Plasmas (1999)). By means of this new tool, the maximum average \beta is expected to be increased for existing configurations while, at the same time, new parameter regions of the optimization space could be identified and explored.