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In tokamaks, the temperature of the plasma-facing wall is an important parameter for achieving particle balance and therefore steady-state operation. QUEST, which is a middle-sized spherical tokamak, has hot walls that act as plasma-facing walls. They can be actively heated with sheath heaters and actively cooled with water. To control the wall temperature, heating and cooling systems have been developed. These systems adjust the power of the sheath heaters and the motor valves of the cooling system, respectively. The two systems communicate via Ethernet through UDP and control the hot-wall temperature cooperatively. The plasma control system (PCS) in QUEST has also been modified, especially with respect to gas fueling, in order to enable long-duration plasma sustainment. A feedback controller has been installed in the PCS, together with a mass flow controller, allowing Hα emission from the plasma which is used as a reference signal, to be well controlled. Plasma density calculations using a field-programmable gate array are proposed for the feedback control system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The plasma control system (PCS) of QUEST is developed according to the progress of QUEST project. Since one of the critical goals of the project is to achieve the steady-state operation with high temperature vacuum vessel wall, the PCS is also required to have the capability to control the plasma for a long period. For the increase of the loads to processing power of the PCS, the PCS is decentralized with the use of reflective memories (RFMs). The PCS controls the plasma edge position with the real-time identification of plasma current and its position. This identification is done with not only flux loops but also hall sensors. The gas fueling method by piezo valve with monitoring the Hα signal filtered by a digital low-pass filter are proposed and suitable for the steady-state operation on QUEST. The present status and prospect of the PCS are presented with recent topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The plasma control system (PCS) of QUEST was a centralized system, which lost its scalability because of the overload imposed on its central processing unit (CPU) of the PCS, making it impossible to add new functions. Thus, the PCS is distributed into a main workstation (WS) and subsystem (SS) with a reflective memory (RFM) in order to share data between these systems so as to mitigate the load on each system. As a result, 128 double-precision floating-point numbers (DBLs) can be transferred from the SS to the WS with a maximum latency of 250 μs. The WS and the SS each have quad-core CPUs, and tasks are executed in parallel. Although one of the four cores is intermittently occupied by up to 90% by this transaction, the occupation is normally 60%. A time correction procedure is used to map the recorded data sets on the WS and the SS to a common time base by referring to the time difference between two systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]