ISTTOK control system upgrade

Abstract The ISTTOK tokamak ( Ip  = 4 kA, BT  = 0.5 T, R  = 0.46 m, a  = 0.085 m) is one of the few tokamaks with regular alternate plasma current (AC) discharges scientific programme. In order to improve the discharge stability and to increase the number of AC discharge cycles a novel control system was developed. The controller acquires data from 50 analog-to-digital converter (ADC) channels of real-time diagnostics and measurements: tomography, Mirnov coils, interferometer, electric probes, sine and cosine probes, bolometer, current delivered by the power supplies, loop voltage and plasma current. The system has a control cycle of 100 μs during which it reads all the diagnostics connected to the advanced telecommunications computing architecture (ATCA) digitizers and sends the control reference to ISTTOK actuators. The controller algorithms are executed on an Intel ® Q8200 chip with 4 cores running at 2.33 GHz and connected to the I/O interfaces through an ATCA based environment. The real-time control system was programmed in C++ on top of the Multi-threaded Application Real-Time executor (MARTe). To extend the duration of the AC discharges and the plasma stability a new magnetising field power supply was commissioned and the horizontal and vertical field power supplies were also upgraded. The new system also features a user-friendly interface based on HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and Javascript to configure the controller parameters. This paper presents the ISTTOK control system and the consequent update of real-time diagnostics and actuators.