The tilted toroidal field coil concept for tokamaks

Since the late '80 a considerable amount of work has been done on the implication of tilting in the azimuthal direction the toroidal field coil of a tokamak. Tilted coil with different properties have been proposed, and even small prototype tokamaks have been built.
The two immediate advantages introduced by tilted coils are (i) a drastic reduction of some components of the electromagnetic forces in certain areas, and (ii) the generation of poloidal field, in addition to toroidal field. The former advantage allows for a partial relaxation of the reinforcing structural material required in the machine design, while the poloidal flux could be used alone or in conjunction with a conventional central solenoid to simplify the design and/or achieve better performances.
Despite the work done, it is however not yet clear whether ``a tilted tokamak'' provides enough benefits to stimulate further studies and eventually its realization on real scale. In this talk, I will review some of the work done so far, and present preliminary results of my research effort on the topic.