Fast regression of the tritium breeding ratio in fusion reactors

Abstract

The tritium breeding ratio (TBR) is an essential quantity for the design of modern and next-generation D-T fueled nuclear fusion reactors. Representing the ratio between tritium fuel generated in breeding blankets and fuel consumed during reactor runtime, the TBR depends on reactor geometry and material properties in a complex manner. In this work, we explored the training of surrogate models to produce a cheap but high-quality approximation for a Monte Carlo (MC) TBR model in use at the UK Atomic Energy Authority. We investigated possibilities for dimensional reduction of its feature space, reviewed 9 families of surrogate models for potential applicability, and performed hyperparameter optimization. Here we present the performance and scaling properties of these models, the fastest of which, an artificial neural network, demonstrated $R^2 = 0.985$ and a mean prediction time of $0.898~\mu\textrm{s}$ , representing a relative speedup of $8\times 10^6$ with respect to the expensive MC model. We further present a novel adaptive sampling algorithm, Quality-Adaptive Surrogate Sampling, capable of interfacing with any of the individually studied surrogates. Our preliminary testing on a toy TBR theory has demonstrated the efficacy of this algorithm for accelerating the surrogate modelling process.

Keywords

• nuclear fusion
• surrogate model
• tritium breeding
• regression
• fast approximation
• adaptive sampling