Plasma profile data

profiletools is primarily designed for working with profile data from magnetic confinement fusion devices, namely the Alcator C-Mod tokamak at MIT. The BivariatePlasmaProfile class is an extension of Profile designed for this particular use case.

Data model

Plasma profile data are functions of space (1, 2 or 3 coordinates) and time (hence the term “bivariate” even when X_dim is greater than 2). Time is always the first column in X, with the remaining spatial coordinates forming the other columns.

Tokamak coordinate systems

BivariatePlasmaProfile uses eqtools (https://github.com/PSFCPlasmaTools/eqtools/, http://eqtools.readthedocs.org/) to support the myriad coordinate systems used in tokamak research. Coordinate transforms are handled using the convert_abscissa() method.

Constraints for Gaussian process regression

BivariatePlasmaProfile provides two methods for adding constraints to the Gaussian process created with create_gp(): constrain_slope_on_axis() applies a zero slope constraint at the magnetic axis and constrain_at_limiter() applies approximate zero slope and value constraints at the location of the limiter. Note, however, that both of these constraints are applied automatically when calling create_gp(). You can disable them using the constrain_slope_one_axis and constrain_at_limiter keywords to create_gp(), and you can influence their behavior with the axis_constraint_kwargs and limiter_constraint_kwargs keywords.