29 June 2026 to 3 July 2026
EICC, Edinburgh
Europe/London timezone

Tokamak GOLEM for fusion education - chapter 17: plasma current stabilization, Bayesian optimization, runaway electrons and NN-based visual tomography

Not scheduled
20m
EICC, Edinburgh

EICC, Edinburgh

150 Morrison St, Edinburgh EH3 8EE
Poster Presentation Other - MCF

Description

Tokamak GOLEM serves as an educational tokamak at the Czech Technical University in Prague. It is the world's oldest operational tokamak. Its unique remote-control interface enables hands-on training for students not only at CTU, but also internationally. This contribution presents the latest students' projects on the tokamak GOLEM. This is the second part of two contributions on this subject.

Plasma current stabilization has been achieved using an auxiliary primary winding powered by AE TECHRON current amplifiers. Stabilization has been implemented for both chamber and plasma current using a user-defined waveform that has been manually set prior to each discharge.
A flattop plasma current was heuristically obtained and prolonged up to 10 ms through position stabilization and newly installed current stabilization systems. Work continues on analytical and numerical determination of stabilization waveforms for more robust flattop regimes.

The project covering direct control of the tokamak by a Bayesian optimizer was extended to include scaling factors for feed-forward waveforms for position and current control power supply which allowed to improve previous results.

A simple Arduino-based physical control panel is being constructed to automatically produce the discharge command in order to simplify setting up the GOLEM discharge so even the youngest visitors can run this under supervision.

Localized runaway electron (RE) losses are investigated using the DDRE (Direct Detection of Runaway Electrons) probe, which enables direct, energy and pitch-angle–resolved detection of runaway electrons via a cascade of thin scintillation pins. The results are compared with reconstructions of RE loss parameters derived from an inversion of a forward bremsstrahlung model and multi-view hard X-ray (HXR) measurements outside the vacuum vessel.

Correlations between HXR bursts and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) activity were investigated by combining measurements from the Timepix3 pixel detector with Mirnov coil magnetic signals. Phase-coupled harmonic components with characteristic phase shifts were identified using continuous wavelet transform–based ridge extraction and minimum-coherence measures.

Ongoing research on the GOLEM tokamak investigates correlations between neural network–based visible camera tomography and Mirnov coil measurements.

Author

Marek Tunkl (Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering CTU in Prague, Department of Physics, Prague 1, Czech Republic)

Co-authors

Ms Sara Abbasi (Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering CTU in Prague, Department of Physics, Prague 1, Czech Republic) Mr Bruno Boczek (Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering CTU in Prague, Department of Physics, Prague 1, Czech Republic) Mr Jan Buryanec (Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering CTU in Prague, Department of Physics, Prague 1, Czech Republic) Ondrej Ficker (Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering CTU in Prague, Department of Physics, Prague 1, Czech Republic; Institute of Plasma Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Fusion Plasma division, Prague, Czech Republic) Gergo I. Pokol (Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering CTU in Prague, Department of Physics, Prague 1, Czech Republic; Department of Nuclear Techniques, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Budapest University of Technology and Economics) Mr Přemysl Pilař (Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering CTU in Prague, Department of Physics, Prague 1, Czech Republic) Mr Lukáš Lobko (Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering CTU in Prague, Department of Physics, Prague 1, Czech Republic; Department of Applied Physics, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium) Mr Štěpán Malec (Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering CTU in Prague, Department of Physics, Prague 1, Czech Republic) Ms Tereza Oktábcová (Gymnasium Na Zatlance 11, Prague, Czech Republic) Mr Jorge Paz-Peñuelas Oliván (Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering CTU in Prague, Department of Physics, Prague 1, Czech Republic) Katherin Paola Gomez Romero (Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering CTU in Prague, Department of Physics, Prague 1, Czech Republic) Mr Vojtěch Svoboda (Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering CTU in Prague, Department of Physics, Prague 1, Czech Republic) Kristián Jakub Wijsman (Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering CTU in Prague, Department of Physics, Prague 1, Czech Republic)

Presentation materials