CPS-FR: Magnetic control of TCV tokamak plasmas through Deep Reinforcement Learning

Federico Felici

Swiss Plasma Center, EPFL

Friday, August 26, 2022

4:00pm

Virtual

PSFC Seminars

A key challenge in tokamak operations is to shape and maintain a high-temperature plasma within the vessel. This requires regulating the plasma position and shape via magnetic fields generated by a set of control coils. This work presents a new architecture for designing a tokamak magnetic controller based on deep reinforcement learning. The controller is entirely trained on a physics-based simulator and then deployed on the TCV tokamak hardware, where it was successful in controlling a diverse set of plasma configurations, including a new configuration featuring two plasmas in the vessel simultaneously. The control architecture replaces separate controllers used in traditional architectures with a single control policy. This lecture will provide details about the training and deployment of the reinforcement learning algorithm, as well as providing a comparison with more traditional control engineering solutions to the magnetic control problem.
 

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