Progress in Digital Twin Development of Virtual Tokamak Platform

As research and development for fusion energy are progressing, their emphasis on reactor relevant technologies is rapidly growing. Regarding the software technologies for fusion research and development, it becomes increasingly more important to integrate physics-oriented simulation and analysis with engineering design. Recently, the development of a virtual tokamak platform has been launched aiming for a novel research platform to enable such an integration of physics and engineering research based on digital twin technologies (DTTs). In this work, the progress in the development of the virtual tokamak platform is reported. Key DTTs are developed to enable the virtualization of the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) tokamak by implementing Virtual KSTAR (V-KSTAR). Two distinct operation modes of V-KSTAR are defined and developed by combining the DTTs: 1) the real-time monitoring system and 2) post-analysis system of KSTAR experiment and simulation. It is presented that efficient virtual systems can be implemented to monitor the temperatures of the plasma-facing components, the status of magnetic coils, and so on. Also, it is demonstrated that 3-D analyses of fusion data become feasible within V-KSTAR. As an example, a 3-D Monte Carlo neutral beam injected (NBI) simulation is implemented within the virtual framework, which allows the calculation of fast ion losses on plasma-facing components. Ongoing developments are also reported to broaden the capabilities of V-KSTAR.