Optimal estimation of plasma boundary shape using magnetic probe measurements in Damavand tokamak

Abstract

This paper introduces an optimal estimation methodology to estimate the boundary shape of plasma in Damavand tokamak (DT). The first step of the introduced methodology is determining an initial guess of the plasma center. An accurate initial guess of the plasma center can improve the performance of the boundary shape estimation. A methodology to find the best arrangement of filaments around the plasma center and their current values for different numbers of plasma filaments is introduced. The Tikhonov regularization method is used to estimate the current values of assumed filaments as an ill-conditioned linear least squares problem. The simulation results show that the Tikhonov has a better performance than the other regularization methods from the computation time and estimation error performance perspectives. In two circular and elongated scenarios, experimental datasets of DT are employed to show the effectiveness of the method.