Nuclear fusion control-oriented plasma physics

The development of control techniques for the efficient and reliable operation of a fusion reactor is one of the most challenging issues nowadays and it would provide great advantages over existing energy sources: Unlimited fuel availability, no greenhouse gases, lack of radioactive waste and no risk of a nuclear accident. In this paper it is made a control-oriented review of the nuclear fusion technology, providing a description of the fusion process focused in the most used fusion reactor topology: the tokamak. To do that, a development of the MHD equations of plasma is stated, which are usually applied together with the transport equations in codes as ASTRA for simulation purposes, with the aim of providing an adequate background for control engineers to derive control-oriented tokamak plasma models.

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