Between-Shot Analysis
Between shots, automated analysis turns the last discharge into corrections for the next, tightening the loop over an operating day.
The inter-shot cycle
In pulsed operation, discharges are separated by minutes. That gap is used to process the data just recorded, judge how the discharge went, and adjust the plan for the next one. Between-shot analysis is the machinery that does this quickly and, increasingly, automatically.
What it computes
- Whether the discharge met its targets
- Which controllers saturated or fought each other
- Reconstructed profiles and equilibrium for the shot
- Flags for any off-normal events that occurred
- Suggested tweaks to the next pulse schedule
Speed matters
The analysis must finish inside the inter-shot interval or it delays operations. This favors reduced analyses that run in seconds over full-fidelity reconstructions that take hours. High-fidelity analysis still happens, but offline; the between-shot layer produces just enough to decide the next shot.
Closing the outer loop
Between-shot analysis is a slow, human-supervised feedback loop wrapped around the fast in-shot loops. If the plasma consistently undershoots a target, the analysis suggests raising a feedforward, which the operator or an automated routine applies. Over a run, this converges the machine onto the desired scenario faster than trial and error.
In the Kronos program
Because Kronos machines are being designed with a digital twin, between-shot analysis is planned to feed the same models used in simulation, so a discrepancy between predicted and actual behavior updates the model as well as the next schedule. This keeps the flight simulator and the real machine in agreement as operation proceeds after first plasma.