We present a comprehensive survey of the various computational methods in CEDRES++ for finding equilibria of toroidal plasma. Our focus is on free-boundary plasma equilibria, where either poloidal field coil currents or the temporal evolution of voltages in poloidal field circuit systems are given data. Centered around a piecewise linear finite element representation of the poloidal flux map, our approach allows in large parts the use of established numerical schemes. The coupling of a finite element method and a boundary element method gives consistent numerical solutions for equilibrium problems in unbounded domains. We formulate a new Newton method for the discretized nonlinear problem to tackle the various non-linearities, including the free plasma boundary. The Newton method guarantees fast convergence and is the main building block for the inverse equilibrium problems that we can handle in CEDRES++ as well. The inverse problems aim at finding either poloidal field coil currents that ensure a desired shape and position of the plasma or at finding the evolution of the voltages in the poloidal field circuit systems that ensure a prescribed evolution of the plasma shape and position. We provide equilibrium simulations for the tokamaks ITER and WEST to illustrate the performance of CEDRES++ and its application areas.Here again, this is a straightforward and simple calculation for all mappings except one: the mapping J P,h that is related to the non-linear current profile in the plasma domain. The mapping J P,h is given by
Recent advances in experimental measurements of magneto-optic properties of tokamak plasmas and progress in formulation of numerical algorithms for the analysis of magnetic data have allowed the self-consistent determination of the current density in the JET tokamak, in Ohmic and additionally heated discharges. An investigation of the numerical response of a model with finite parameterization to the uncertainties of the available discrete data is carried out. The error propagation is analysed for various types of discharges, and results on the safety factor profile are presented.
The reconstruction of the equilibrium of a plasma in a Tokamak is a free boundary problem described by the Grad-Shafranov equation in axisymmetric configuration. The right-hand side of this equation is a nonlinear source, which represents the toroidal component of the plasma current density. This paper deals with the identification of this nonlinearity source from experimental measurements in real time. The proposed method is based on a fixed point algorithm, a finite element resolution, a reduced basis method and a least-square optimization formulation. This is implemented in a software called Equinox with which several numerical experiments are conducted to explore the identification problem. It is shown that the identification of the profile of the averaged current density and of the safety factor as a function of the poloidal flux is very robust.
The recent development of real time measurements and control tools in JET has enhanced the reliability and reproducibility of the relevant ITER scenarios.
We present a method based on the use of toroidal harmonics and on a modelization of the poloidal field coils and divertor coils for the 2D interpolation and extrapolation of discrete magnetic measurements in a tokamak. The method is generic and can be used to provide Cauchy boundary conditions needed as input by a fixed domain equilibrium reconstruction code like Equinox [1]. It can also be used to extrapolate the magnetic measurements in order to compute the plasma boundary itself. The proposed method and algorithm are detailed in the paper and results from numerous numerical experiments are presented. The method is foreseen to be used in the real time plasma control loop on the WEST tokamak [2].
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