A Survey on Control-oriented Plasma Physics in Tokamak Reactors

Nuclear fusion control, and specifically plasma control, represents one of the newest and more promising applications of Control Engineering, with increasing interest in the control community. In this paper it is made a control-oriented review of the state of the art of nuclear fusion techniques. For this purpose, a comprehensive description of the fusion process is provided, focusing in the most used fusion reactor topology the tokamakthat will also be used at ITER. From this point of view, a description of the MHD equations of plasma is given, which are usually applied together with the transport equations for the design of simulators as DINA. Also, a review of the most used codes for plasma simulation is given, with the aim of providing a starting point for control engineers to derive their own code or choose the appropriate existing one to work on. Key-Words: Fusion Control; Plasma Physics; Tokamak Simulation; MHD.