Plasma magnetic control for DEMO tokamak using MPC

Abstract

This paper proposes a model predictive controller (MPC) designed to tackle the magnetic control of the DEMO plasma. DEMO is an ambitious EU project aimed at the construction by 2050 of a tokamak demonstrating that energy from nuclear fusion can be conveniently commercially used. Magnetic control is one of the problems to be solved to operate the machine. Using MPC, in this paper it is shown how it is possible to take into account all the various constraints on the input and state variables during the controller design. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by means of simulations, using a validated nonlinear evolution code describing the interactions between the plasma and the surrounding metallic strictures.