Experimental implementation of a real-time power flux estimator for the ITER first wall on the TCV tokamak

Abstract A control-oriented approach to the monitoring of wall power flux densities on ITER has been successfully developed. It is based on real-time equilibrium reconstruction in 2-D which is then used to describe the deposited heat flux as a poloidal flux function with user specified parameters for the power exhausted into the scrape-off layer (SOL) and the SOL heat flux width. To account for the real 3-D geometry of the plasma-facing components (PFC), appropriate weighting factors are derived from magnetic field line tracing in 3-D. Integration of the 3-D effect is performed with a new GUI-based software environment, SMITER, incorporating a field line tracer and permitting import and meshing of PFC CAD models. The paper discusses the experimental demonstration of the model-based wall heat flux algorithm on the TCV tokamak, reporting on the benchmarking of the new code package, SMITER against infra-red camera heat flux measurements and the derivation of the component shaping weighting factors. A comparison of the real-time estimation of the peak power flux and its spatial location against the off-line infra-red measurement for limiter plasma configurations is presented.