First demonstration of real-time kinetic equilibrium reconstruction on TCV by coupling LIUQE and RAPTOR

Kinetic equilibrium reconstruction (KER) in tokamaks is the solution of the free-boundary MHD equilibrium that best fits the external magnetic measurements and the internal plasma profiles as imposed from modeling and/or available internal measurements. In this paper, for the first time, the KER has been performed in real-time by coupling the free-boundary equilibrium code LIUQE to the 1.5D transport code RAPTOR, during a TCV discharge. The transport code is used as a dynamic state observer evolving the current diffusion equation, the electron heat and particle diffusion equations and correcting the prediction with the measurements available in real-time, making use of the extended Kalman filter (EKF) method. The simple coupling strategy, based on a matching of the free functions (p ' TT '