Title :
The MHD Control System for the FTU Tokamak
Author :
Antona, G.D. ; Cirant, S. ; Davoudi, M.
Author_Institution :
Energy Dept., Politec. di Milano, Milan, Italy
Abstract :
In this paper the architecture of the MHD control system for the Frascati Tokamak Upgrade (FTU) is presented. This control is aimed to stabilize tearing modes (TM) in the plasma by EC heating and current drive. TMs are detected and spatially localized by correlating several ECE channels and Mirnov coil signals; two independent antennas are steered in order to track the TM instability. To guarantee short locking time a fast real-time plasma equilibrium code is used to locate the instability when there is no TM evidence and real-time ray tracing code is used to estimate the location where EC power is deposited. A set of hardware consisting of FPGA and DSP modules on PXI bus for executing the diagnosis and control algorithms is proposed. The overall system layout is introduced together with a description of the data communication among the processors.
Keywords :
Tokamak devices; field programmable gate arrays; fusion reactor instrumentation; fusion reactor reaction chamber; plasma instability; plasma magnetohydrodynamics; plasma radiofrequency heating; plasma toroidal confinement; DSP modules; EC heating; EC power; ECE channels; FPGA modules; FTU tokamak; Frascati Tokamak Upgrade; MHD control system; Mirnov coil signals; PXI bus; TM instability; current drive; data communication; real-time ray tracing code; tearing modes; Antennas; Control systems; Digital signal processing; Field programmable gate arrays; Magnetohydrodynamics; Plasmas; Real time systems; Control systems; Tokamak devices; magnetohydrodynamics; parallel processing;
Journal_Title :
Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TNS.2011.2159392
