[DrMattMoynihan]

Hello All,

In their recent paper, the EMC2 team listed the cusp confined volume as 5000 cm^3. That is crazy big. If that was shaped as a sphere, it would nearly fill the whole ring volume.



This is too scale. Here is my question: what is the magnetic field vector field outside this plasma volume?
There is an easy way to estimate this: treat the vector field made by the B field like a flowing fluid and solve it with some free CFD software. I would start with a two dimensional simulation.



I am trying to use simFLOW to do this CFD simulation. A couple of issues I am having:

1. Doing a 2D simulation does not seem possible (or easier) in simFLOW. I switched to 3D.
2. Fortunately, I can import the ring geometry into simFLOW using STL files.
3. How do I define the boundary conditions?



All the X-, Y- and Z- faces are planes of symmetry. But, the positive faces need to be broken up into “inlet” and “outlet” surfaces. How do I do that?
4. How do I mesh the space between the rings and the spherical surface only?
Thanks for the advice!

I would also like to transition to openFOAM to do the magnetic calculations, by MHD equations are half navier-stokes, so using the CFD solver seemed like a good stepping stone.