Improved Real-time Equilibrium Reconstruction with Kinetic Constraints on DIII-D and NSTX-U

We report on the improvements to real-time (RT) equilibrium reconstruction by including kinetic constraints which more robustly reflect both the pressure and current profiles including pedestals. Since not all quantities of interest in tokamak plasmas can be measured directly, RT equilibrium reconstruction codes are used. However, plasma internal profiles remain largely unconstrained when only data from magnetics are used. For algorithms depending on profile accuracy, it is crucial to include data from measurements internal to the plasma. The inclusion of pressure profile fits has been shown to significantly improve the reconstructed pressure profile. The robustness has been improved by adding buffers for the CER, and TS data. Even though the pressure profiles consistently exhibit the pedestal, the current density does not consistently show the bootstrap peak. To address this, RT equilibrium reconstruction has been extended to receive current density constraints. These are calculated using the Sauter model. An RT Thomson system is being implemented on NSTX-U, paving the way for improvements to be ported and evaluated in real-time once possible.