ASTRA — Matlab integration for the control of tokamaks

As a consequence of the continued increase in the worldwide demand of energy the need to achieve new sources of power has come out as a very important issue. In this sense, nuclear fusion has arisen to be a promising source of energy which has entailed an increasing interest in solving the different control problems existing in the nuclear fusion reactors such as tokamaks. The aim of this manuscript is to show how one of the existing codes that simulates the performance of tokamaks, the ASTRA code, can be integrated into the Matlab - Simulink tool in order to make more easier and comfortable the development of suitable controllers for Tokamaks. As a demonstrative case study to show the feasibility and the goodness of the proposed ASTRA-Matlab integration, specifically, a simple PID controller for the loop voltage of a Tokamak has been designed. The integration achieved represents an original and innovative issue in the Tokamak control area and it provides new possibilities to the development and application of advanced control schemes to the standardized and widely extended ASTRA simulation code for Tokamaks.