Nonlinear PDE-Based control of the electron temperature in H-mode tokamak plasmas

This paper studies the exponential stability of the electron temperature profile in H-mode tokamak plasmas. Lyapunov stability analysis is carried in an infinite-dimensional setting on the nonlinear partial differential equation describing the dynamics. The nonlinear components are handled with the sum of squares framework, in order to prove the exponential convergence of the Lyapunov function. Nominal stability of the system is first checked, then a controller is proposed to improve the convergence rate of the closed-loop system. The controller algorithm including the input constraints is then used for profile tracking on the RAPTOR simulator with different challenging scenarios.