菊池 祐介

The Rapid development of high power and high speed semiconductor switching devices has led to their various applications in related plasma fields. Especially, a high speed inverter power supply can be used as an RF power source instead of conventional linear amplifiers and a power supply to control the magnetic field in a fusion plasma device. In this paper, RF thermal plasma production and plasma heating experiments are described emphasis placed on using a static induction transistor inverter at a frequency range between 200 kHz and 2.5 MHz as an RF power supply. Efficient thermal plasma production is achieved experimentally by using a flexible and easily operated high power semiconductor inverter power supply. Insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) inverter power supplies driven by a high speed digital signal processor are applied as tokamak joule coil and vertical coil power supplies to control plasma current waveform and plasma equilibrium. Output characteristics, such as the arbitrary bipolar waveform generation of a pulse width modulation (PWM) inverter using digital signal processor (DSP) can be successfully applied to tokamak power supplies for flexible plasma current operation and fast position control of a small tokamak.

To achieve high confinement properties of a tokamak plasma, it is necessary to control the plasma position, current profile, shape of magnetic surface etc.. In addition to these, it has been found that a resistive wall mode (RWM) may limit the achievable plasma beta in present tokamak devices. Therefore, it is expected that an active feedback control using external coils is necessary to stabilize the RWM. A power supply for plasma control coils requires an accurate controllability and a fast response against such plasma disturbances. Recent development of high power and fast switching semiconductors, such as Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) and MOSFET, improves the temporal response of power supply with a great extent. A small tokamak device, HYBTOK-II, is equipped with IGBT inverter power supplies for Joule and vertical field coils. In this paper a real-time feedback control of the plasma horizontal position has been employed with Digital Signal Processor (DSP). The experimental results on plasma response with such a feedback control have been compared with analysis of plasma column motion using transfer functions.