Olivier Sauter

Yoeri Poels, Cristina Venturini, Alessandro Pau et al.

Maximizing fusion performance in tokamaks relies on high energy confinement, often achieved through distinct operating regimes. The automated labeling of these confinement states is crucial to enable large-scale analyses or for real-time control applications. While this task becomes difficult to automate near state transitions or in marginal scenarios, much success has been achieved with data-driven models. However, these methods generally provide predictions as point estimates, and cannot adequately deal with missing and/or broken input signals. To enable wide-range applicability, we develop methods for confinement state classification with uncertainty quantification and model robustness. We focus on off-line analysis for TCV discharges, distinguishing L-mode, H-mode, and an in-between dithering phase (D). We propose ensembling data-driven methods on two axes: model formulations and feature sets. The former considers a dynamic formulation based on a recurrent Fourier Neural Operator-architecture and a static formulation based on gradient-boosted decision trees. These models are trained using multiple feature groupings categorized by diagnostic system or physical quantity. A dataset of 302 TCV discharges is fully labeled, and will be publicly released. We evaluate our method quantitatively using Cohen's kappa coefficient for predictive performance and the Expected Calibration Error for the uncertainty calibration. Furthermore, we discuss performance using a variety of common and alternative scenarios, the performance of individual components, out-of-distribution performance, cases of broken or missing signals, and evaluate conditionally-averaged behavior around different state transitions. Overall, the proposed method can distinguish L, D and H-mode with high performance, can cope with missing or broken signals, and provides meaningful uncertainty estimates.

Andrin Bürli, Alessandro Pau, Thomas Koller et al.

Controlling and monitoring plasma within a tokamak device is complex and challenging. Plasma off-normal events, such as disruptions, are hindering steady-state operation. For large devices, they can even endanger the machine's integrity and it represents in general one of the most serious concerns for the exploitation of the tokamak concept for future power plants. Effective plasma state monitoring carries the potential to enable an understanding of such phenomena and their evolution which is crucial for the successful operation of tokamaks. This paper presents the application of a transparent and data-driven methodology to monitor the plasma state in a tokamak. Compared to previous studies in the field, supervised and unsupervised learning techniques are combined. The dataset consisted of 520 expert-validated discharges from JET. The goal was to provide an interpretable plasma state representation for the JET operational space by leveraging multi-task learning for the first time in the context of plasma state monitoring. When evaluated as disruption predictors, a sequence-based approach showed significant improvements compared to the state-based models. The best resulting network achieved a promising cross-validated success rate when combined with a physical indicator and accounting for nearby instabilities. Qualitative evaluations of the learned latent space uncovered operational and disruptive regions as well as patterns related to learned dynamics and global feature importance. The applied methodology provides novel possibilities for the definition of triggers to switch between different control scenarios, data analysis, and learning as well as exploring latent dynamics for plasma state monitoring. It also showed promising quantitative and qualitative results with warning times suitable for avoidance purposes and distributions that are consistent with known physical mechanisms.

Allen M. Wang, Alessandro Pau, Cristina Rea et al. · mit

The rampdown phase of a tokamak pulse is difficult to simulate and often exacerbates multiple plasma instabilities. To reduce the risk of disrupting operations, we leverage advances in Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) to combine physics with data-driven models, developing a neural state-space model (NSSM) that predicts plasma dynamics during Tokamak à Configuration Variable (TCV) rampdowns. The NSSM efficiently learns dynamics from a modest dataset of 311 pulses with only five pulses in a reactor-relevant high-performance regime. The NSSM is parallelized across uncertainties, and reinforcement learning (RL) is applied to design trajectories that avoid instability limits. High-performance experiments at TCV show statistically significant improvements in relevant metrics. A predict-first experiment, increasing plasma current by 20% from baseline, demonstrates the NSSM's ability to make small extrapolations. The developed approach paves the way for designing tokamak controls with robustness to considerable uncertainty and demonstrates the relevance of SciML for fusion experiments.

Yoeri Poels, Alessandro Pau, Christian Donner et al.

When a plasma disrupts in a tokamak, significant heat and electromagnetic loads are deposited onto the surrounding device components. These forces scale with plasma current and magnetic field strength, making disruptions one of the key challenges for future devices. Unfortunately, disruptions are not fully understood, with many different underlying causes that are difficult to anticipate. Data-driven models have shown success in predicting them, but they only provide limited interpretability. On the other hand, large-scale statistical analyses have been a great asset to understanding disruptive patterns. In this paper, we leverage data-driven methods to find an interpretable representation of the plasma state for disruption characterization. Specifically, we use a latent variable model to represent diagnostic measurements as a low-dimensional, latent representation. We build upon the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) framework, and extend it for (1) continuous projections of plasma trajectories; (2) a multimodal structure to separate operating regimes; and (3) separation with respect to disruptive regimes. Subsequently, we can identify continuous indicators for the disruption rate and the disruptivity based on statistical properties of measurement data. The proposed method is demonstrated using a dataset of approximately 1600 TCV discharges, selecting for flat-top disruptions or regular terminations. We evaluate the method with respect to (1) the identified disruption risk and its correlation with other plasma properties; (2) the ability to distinguish different types of disruptions; and (3) downstream analyses. For the latter, we conduct a demonstrative study on identifying parameters connected to disruptions using counterfactual-like analysis. Overall, the method can adequately identify distinct operating regimes characterized by varying proximity to disruptions in an interpretable manner.