Model-based real-time power flux estimator for the ITER first wall

The actively cooled technology used for the plasma facing components demands monitoring and control of heat flux on ITER first wall (FW) panels. Intense heat loads are predicted on the FW, even well before the burning plasma phase. Thus, a real-time (RT) FW heat load control system is mandatory from early plasma operation of the ITER tokamak. As a first step into this development, the paper presents a control oriented model, based on the RT equilibrium reconstruction for the ITER plasma control system. The paper discusses the model based approach and reports the Matlab/Simulink implementation of the algorithm. Key aspects of system integration and testing are reported, leading to the verification of the system in a RT environment.