Nonlinear burn condition control in tokamaks using isotopic fuel tailoring

One of the fundamental problems in tokamak fusion reactors is how to control the plasma density and temperature in order to regulate the amount of fusion power produced by the device. Control of these parameters will be critical to the success of burning plasma experiments like ITER. The most previous burn condition control efforts use either non-model based control designs or techniques based on models linearized around particular operating points. Such strategies limit the potential operational space and must be carefully retuned or redesigned to accommodate changes in operating points or plasma parameters. In this work, a nonlinear dynamic model of the spatial averages of energy and ion species densities is used to synthesize a nonlinear feedback controller for stabilizing the burn condition. The nonlinear model-based control strategy guarantees a much larger operational space than previous linear controllers. Because it is not designed around a particular operating point, the controller can be used to move from one burn condition to another. The proposed scheme first attempts to use regulation of the auxiliary heating power to reject temperature perturbations, then, if necessary, uses isotopic fuel tailoring as a way to reduce fusion heating during positive temperature perturbations. A global model of hydrogen recycling is incorporated into the model used for design and simulation, and the proposed control scheme is tested for a range of recycling model parameters. As we find the possibility of changing the isotopic mix can be limited for certain unfavorable recycling conditions, we also consider impurity injection as a back-up method for controlling the system. A simple supervisory control strategy is proposed to switch between the primary and back-up control schemes based on stability and performance criteria. A zero-dimensional simulation study is used to study the performance of the control scheme for several scenarios and model parameters. Finally, a one-dimensional simulation is done to test the robustness of the control scheme to spatially varying parameters.