A flexible architecture for plasma magnetic control in tokamak reactors

Plasma magnetic control is one of the core engineering issues to be tackled in a fusion device. Over the last years, model based approaches have been proposed to face this issue, proving their effectiveness and allowing to reduce the time span needed for control testing and validation. The first part of this work is intended to give an overview of the subject, from the historical milestones to the underlying physics; the most common techniques for tokamak plasmas electromagnetic modeling and control are also introduced and discussed. After this introduction, a general architecture for plasma magnetic control in tokamaks is proposed. Finally, the proposed solution is applied to the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) tokamak, where a new plasma magnetic control architecture was developed and implemented during the 2016-2018 experimental campaigns, and to the Japan Torus-60 Super Advanced (JT-60SA) device, which is currently under construction in Japan.