Real-time plasma equilibrium reconstruction in a Tokamak

Abstract

The problem of equilibrium of a plasma in a Tokamak is a free boundary problem described by the Grad-Shafranov equation in axisymmetric configurations. The right hand side of this equation is a non linear source, which represents the toroidal component of the plasma current density. This paper deals with the real time identification of this non linear source from experimental measurements. The proposed method is based on a fixed point algorithm, a finite element resolution, a reduced basis method and a least-square optimization formulation. © 2008 IOP Publishing Ltd.