New developments for real time plasma control system of TCV Tokamak based on FPGA

The vertical instability problem of highly-elongated plasmas has been investigated. A reduced-order model for control purpose has been derived from the full-order plasma RZIP model. Based on reduced model, an optimal control has been designed which gives better performance than a legacy PID control in the presence of measurement noise. The control algorithm is programmed in user-friendly Matlab-Simulink environment. The VHDL code is generated automatically with HDL coder. The control algorithm has been implemented into a COTS FPGA-based system. Hardware in the loop simulation has been performed to test the algorithm in the real world.