Hi, I’m Lorenzo Didò, a master's student in Robotics System and Control at ETH Zurich.  

Between the 3rd and 14th of February, I had the opportunity to attend the “Control and Operation of Tokamaks” course offered at EPFL by the SPS lab.  

It has been my first interaction with the fusion field, and the choice of frequenting this course has been driven completely by curiosity. The curiosity that nuclear fusion has aroused me in the past few years.  

It has also been a wonderful opportunity enhanced by the people I met there. In fact, since it was a PhD level course it was attended by people with different educational levels coming from all parts of the world: PhD, PostDoc, company members and MSc students.  

The course was quite intensive, we have been introduced to the key and basics concepts of control and operations of tokamaks, Operational limits, as well as state-of-the-art research questions and methods for future reactors. To cite some of the topics: Axisymmetric equilibrium control Grad-Shafranov equation, Kinetic, MHD and heat flux control, State observers for kinetic profiles, Off-normal event handling, disruption avoidance, Machine Learning and its role in tokamak operations & control. 

There were some exercise sections, mainly in MATLAB, where we could practise all that we had learned during lectures.  

Aside from the lectures, there have been a lot of opportunities to have fun with other people and know each other better, some example: an unofficial snow trip, karaoke night, fondue dinner and we had also the opportunity to visit the TCV tokamak. 

I really recommend this course to the people reading this article and I want to thank FuseNet for giving me this opportunity.