JET Contributors

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.

A. Panera Alvarez, A. Ho, A. Jarvinen et al.

This work successfully generates an uncertainty-aware surrogate model of the EuroPED plasma pedestal model using the Bayesian neural network with noise contrastive prior (BNN-NCP) technique. This model is trained using data from the JET-ILW pedestal database and subsequent model evaluations, conforming to EuroPED-NN. The BNN-NCP technique has been proven to be a suitable method for generating uncertainty-aware surrogate models. It matches the output results of a regular neural network while providing confidence estimates for predictions as uncertainties. Additionally, it highlights out-of-distribution (OOD) regions using surrogate model uncertainties. This provides critical insights into model robustness and reliability. EuroPED-NN has been physically validated, first, analyzing electron density $n_e\!\left(ψ_{\text{pol}}=0.94\right)$ with respect to increasing plasma current, $I_p$, and second, validating the $Δ-β_{p,ped}$ relation associated with the EuroPED model. This affirms the robustness of the underlying physics learned by the surrogate model. On top of that, the method was used to develop a EuroPED-like model fed with experimental data, i.e. an uncertainty aware experimental model, which is functional in JET database. Both models have been also tested in $\sim 50$ AUG shots.

Diogo R. Ferreira, Pedro J. Carvalho, Carlo Sozzi et al.

The JET baseline scenario is being developed to achieve high fusion performance and sustained fusion power. However, with higher plasma current and higher input power, an increase in pulse disruptivity is being observed. Although there is a wide range of possible disruption causes, the present disruptions seem to be closely related to radiative phenomena such as impurity accumulation, core radiation, and radiative collapse. In this work, we focus on bolometer tomography to reconstruct the plasma radiation profile and, on top of it, we apply anomaly detection to identify the radiation patterns that precede major disruptions. The approach makes extensive use of machine learning. First, we train a surrogate model for plasma tomography based on matrix multiplication, which provides a fast method to compute the plasma radiation profiles across the full extent of any given pulse. Then, we train a variational autoencoder to reproduce the radiation profiles by encoding them into a latent distribution and subsequently decoding them. As an anomaly detector, the variational autoencoder struggles to reproduce unusual behaviors, which includes not only the actual disruptions but their precursors as well. These precursors are identified based on an analysis of the anomaly score across all baseline pulses in two recent campaigns at JET.

Francisco A. Matos, Diogo R. Ferreira, Pedro J. Carvalho et al.

Deep learning is having a profound impact in many fields, especially those that involve some form of image processing. Deep neural networks excel in turning an input image into a set of high-level features. On the other hand, tomography deals with the inverse problem of recreating an image from a number of projections. In plasma diagnostics, tomography aims at reconstructing the cross-section of the plasma from radiation measurements. This reconstruction can be computed with neural networks. However, previous attempts have focused on learning a parametric model of the plasma profile. In this work, we use a deep neural network to produce a full, pixel-by-pixel reconstruction of the plasma profile. For this purpose, we use the overview bolometer system at JET, and we introduce an up-convolutional network that has been trained and tested on a large set of sample tomograms. We show that this network is able to reproduce existing reconstructions with a high level of accuracy, as measured by several metrics.