Design of an energetic particle radiation diagnostic spectroscopy system based on national core chips and Qt on Linux in EAST

Energetic particle radiation diagnoses mainly detect the particles(such as neutrons,gamma rays,hard X-rays,and escaping electrons)that are radiated in the discharge process of the experimental advanced superconducting tokamak device to characterize the operating state of the plasma in real time.The upgrading of these diagnoses requires new instruments based on national(here,“national”means developed and produced by a Chinese company)core chips and open-source software with advanced digitization,a high sampling rate,and a high time resolution.The new spectroscopy system designed in this study adopts the national field-programmable gate array(FPGA)and an analog-to-digital converter as the core chip,and it is developed using Qt on Linux.The communication between the FPGA and embedded controller occurs via a high-speed peripheral component interconnect eXtension for instrument express protocol with a direct memory access mode.On this basis,the time resolution of the system is improved from 2 to 1 ms,the maximum channel address is increased to 4096,and the sampling rate is increased from 10 to 80 Msps.Calibration experiments of the spectroscopy system with 152Eu and 137Cs sources demonstrate that the best energy resolution is 0.27%and the measurement error is less than±0.5 keV.

Design of real-time feedback control of vertical growth rate on EAST

Real-time feedback control of vertical growth rate,called gamma control,has been successfully applied to experimental advanced superconducting tokamak(EAST).In this paper,a new gamma control method is proposed to regulate the vertical growth rate,which is an estimator of plasma vertical instability.Thus,the gamma controller can be utilized to keep the tokamak plasma away from its unstable boundary.In this work,the main development process includes three steps:(1)real-time implementation of model-based vertical growth rate calculation,taking advantage of GPU parallel computing capability,(2)design of plasma shape response for dynamic shape control using a slight modification to the plasma boundary,and(3)development of a gamma control algorithm integrated into the EAST plasma control system(PCS).The gamma control was experimentally verified in the EAST 2019 experiment campaign.It is shown that the time evolution of the real-time vertical growth rate agrees with the target value,indicating that the real-time vertical growth rate can be regulated by gamma control.