Development of a Visualization Tool for the ARIES Systems Code

A graphical user interface (GUI) is being developed by the ARIES team to visually display large amounts of system parameter data relevant to tokamak power plants. The objective of the Visual ARIES Systems Scanning Tool (VASST) is to harness the scanning power of the new systems code by filtering the tremendous amount of data and displaying it in an interactive and exploratory manner. The goal of the software tool is to better understand the tradeoffs between design parameters and to gain insight into parametric trends.

Progress has been made in creating a GUI that allows the user to intuitively and interactively create color-coded plots using any of the parameters within the database. Among other features, a user-input constraint allows the user to limit the parameter space to include/exclude certain ranges of data that are of interest.

VASST is being utilized in conjunction with system analysis scans for the ARIES studies reviewing aggressive and conservative physics and technology assumptions to help define tokamak power plants.