Abstract
At present, two main magnetic confinement fusion devices exist: tokamaks and stellarators. Moreover, stellarators have been demonstrated to be a good alternative to tokamaks, due to their ability to operate in continuous mode, which eventually translates into a higher commercial profitability. In stellarators, the magnetic confinement of the plasma is achieved exclusively by the coils, thus no electric current through the plasma is needed. In particular, this article presents the Columbia Non-Neutral Torus stellarator that is located in the Automatic Control Group of Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (EHU). This EHU stellarator maintains symmetry in its structure due to the topology of the mesh that is formed by its coils. A cornerstone of future fusion reactors is to obtain real-time control that enables a sustained reaction. In this article, a control-oriented model for the installed magnetic confinement coils is presented. The model is based on matrices that preserve symmetry, which is defined from physical principles and then validated by different sets of experimental data. Then, based on this model, a novel predictive control suited to this particular model with symmetric objective function is implemented in the numerical simulations, and its response is compared to that of traditional controllers. Finally, this control is implemented in a real plant and the satisfactory experiment results provide validation of both the numerical model and proposed controller.
Highlights
In recent years, there has been an international effort to develop clean energy production technology based on fusion energy, such as =the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) [1].The energy generation involves nuclear fusion reactions, where two or more light element’s atomic nuclei, usually from deuterium and tritium, combine to form different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles
This Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (EHU) stellarator maintains symmetry in its structure due to the topology of the mesh that is formed by its coils
We note that the steady-state error represents the difference between the output signal and the reference desired one once the system has reached a Taking into account the voltage output signal, the black box model is outperformed by both the analytical model and grey box model responses, since both of them provide an accurate estimation of the system response
Summary
There has been an international effort to develop clean energy production technology based on fusion energy, such as =the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) [1]. The real-time control of the plasma by means of the confinement coils plays a key role in the performance of the process and the feasibility of the clean fusion technology. It this sense, it must be considered that the main limiting phenomenon in fusion devices is the premature reaction decay due to plasma instabilities. Stellarators consist of a more complex helical symmetric coil system, symmetric coil system, in such a way that the plasma follows twisting magnetic beam line paths.
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