Towards Current Profile Control in ITER: Potential Approaches and Research Needs
E. Schuster, J.E. Barton, W.P. Wehner
Division of Plasma Physics (DPP) Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS)
New Orleans, Lousiana, USA, October 27-31, 2014
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Abstract
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Many challenging plasma control problems still need to be addressed in
order for the ITER Plasma Control System (PCS) to be able to
successfully achieve the ITER project goals. For instance, setting up
a suitable toroidal current density profile is key for one possible
advanced scenario characterized by noninductive sustainment of the
plasma current and steady-state operation. The nonlinearity and high
dimensionality exhibited by the plasma demand a model-based
current-profile control synthesis procedure that can accommodate this
complexity through embedding the known physics within the design. The
development of a model capturing the dynamics of the plasma relevant
for control design enables not only the design of feedback controllers
for regulation or tracking but also the design of optimal feedforward
controllers for a systematic model-based approach to scenario planning,
the design of state estimators for a reliable real-time reconstruction
of the plasma internal profiles based on limited and noisy diagnostics,
and the development of a fast predictive simulation code for closed-loop
performance evaluation before implementation. Progress towards
control-oriented modeling of the current profile evolution and
associated control design has been reported following both data-driven
and first-principles-driven approaches. An overview of these two
approaches will be provided, as well as a discussion on research needs
associated with each one of the model applications described above.
