Real-time plasma control based on the ISTTOK tomography diagnostic

Area of Science:

• Plasma physics
• Fusion energy research
• Real-time data processing

Background:

• Complex plasma diagnostics require significant computational power.
• Existing systems may not meet the real-time processing demands for active plasma control.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and present a real-time data acquisition and reconstruction (DAR) system for plasma diagnostics.
• To enable submillisecond plasma emissivity computation for active plasma position control in the ISTTOK tokamak.

Main Methods:

• Implementation of a tomographic reconstruction diagnostic using three linear pinhole cameras.
• Development of a DAR system utilizing ATCA technology, FPGAs, and GPUs.
• Real-time firmware/software implementation including front-end FPGA processing, a specialized device driver, and a fast Fourier-Bessel reconstruction algorithm.

Main Results:

• Local computation of plasma emissivity in a poloidal cross section on a submillisecond time scale.
• Successful integration of the DAR system as a module within the central ISTTOK control and data acquisition system (FIRESIGNAL).
• Preliminary results demonstrating system performance and benchmarking against magnetic coil diagnostics.

Conclusions:

• The developed DAR system effectively leverages modern processing power for real-time plasma diagnostics.
• The system's capability for fast tomographic reconstruction supports active plasma position control.
• The implementation showcases a viable approach for enhancing tokamak operational capabilities through advanced data processing.