Nonlinear Boundary Control of Non-Burning Plasma Kinetic Profiles in Cylindrical Geometry

E. Schuster and M. Krstic

41st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control

Las Vegas, NV, USA, December 2002

Abstract

The control of kinetic profiles is among the most important problems in fusion reactor research. It is strongly related to a great number of other problems in fusion energy generation such as burn control, transport reduction, confinement time improvement, MHD instability avoidance and high-beta or high-confinement operating modes access. We consider in this work a set of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDE's) describing approximately the dynamics of the density and energy profiles in a non-burning plasma. Applying a backstepping design we control the kinetic profiles by means of thermal and density actuation at the boundary. Numerical simulations show that the feedback control law designed using only one step of backstepping can successfully control the kinetic profiles.