Vertical stabilization and plasma shape control in the ITER-FEAT tokamak

This paper deals with the problem of designing a plasma current, position, and shape controller for the ITER-FEAT tokamak. Exploiting the features of the plant, we show that it is possible to design separately two control loops: a first loop which stabilizes the vertical position by means of a simple derivative action, and a second loop which drives the plasma current and the geometrical shape descriptors as close as possible to the reference values. The second loop is designed by assigning the dominant closed loop poles.