In-vessel visible inspection system on KSTAR.

To monitor the global formation of the initial plasma and damage to the internal structures of the vacuum vessel, an in-vessel visible inspection system has been installed and operated on the Korean superconducting tokamak advanced research (KSTAR) device. It consists of four inspection illuminators and two visible/H-alpha TV cameras. Each illuminator uses four 150 W metal-halide lamps with separate lamp controllers, and programmable progressive scan charge-coupled device cameras with 1004×1004 resolution at 48 frames/s and a resolution of 640×480 at 210 frames/s are used to capture images. In order to provide vessel inspection capability under any operation condition, the lamps and cameras are fully controlled from the main control room and protected by shutters from deposits during plasma operation. In this paper, we describe the design and operation results of the visible inspection system with the images of the KSTAR Ohmic discharges during the first plasma campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]