Initial testing of ohmic heating through double flux swing during electron cyclotron start-up in the QUEST spherical tokamak

A power-supply system was developed for Ohmic heating(OH)to double×10^(18)the amount of change magnetic flux in the primary central solenoid(CS)on the QUEST spherical tokamak.Two power supplies are connected with stacks of insulated-gate bipolar transistors,and sequentially operated to generate positive and negative CS currents.This bipolar power-supply system is controlled via a field-programmable gate array,which guarantees the safety of the entire system operation.The new OH system,assisted by electron cyclotron heating,enables the stable generation of plasma currents exceeding 100 k A.Moreover,the achieved electron density over the wide range in the major radial direction exceeds the cut-off density for one of the highpower microwave sources in QUEST.This strategy yields target plasmas for future experiments with the electron Bernstein wave.

H_∞Loop Shaping Control for Plasma Vertical Position Instability on QUEST

QUEST has a divertor configuration with a high and a negative n-index, and the problem of plasma vertical position instability control in QUEST is still under extensive study for achieving high efficiency plasma. The instability we considered is that the toroidal plasma moves either up or down in the vacuum chamber until it meets the vessel wall and is extinguished. The actively controlled coils （HCU and HCL） outside the vacuum vessel are serially connected in feedback with a measurement of the plasma vertical position to provide stabilizing control. In this work, a robust controller is employed by using the loop synthesis method, and provides robust stability over a wide range of n-index. Moreover, the gain of the robust controller is lower than that of a typical proportional derivative （PD） controller in the operational frequency range; it indicates that the robust controller needs less power consumption than the PD controller does.