Course on Plasma control

Plasma control is one of the necessary and of the out-most importance system in a tokamak machine. As a matter of fact the correct positioning of the plasma column is one of the major concerns to create a suitable plasma-wall interaction, limiting this interaction to its minimum. Moreover fast plasma displacements such as VDE's originated by a wrong field gradient on axis can cause a sudden disruption, terminating the discharge. On this course plasma current and position control algorithms will be taught, referring the techniques for its tuning and assessment. The session will start addressing an introduction to PID control, state-space models in continuous and discrete time and multiple-input/multiple-output control. Afterwards a description of the magnetic poloidal configuration on ISTTOK will be presented and concluding with an overview of the algorithms used in ISTTOK used on the real-time framework (MARTe) for estimating the plasma current centroid position and application of the feedback control.