Physics-Informed Visual MARFE Prediction on the HL-3 Tokamak

Abstract

The Multifaceted Asymmetric Radiation From the Edge (MARFE) is a critical plasma instability that often precedes density-limit disruptions in tokamaks, posing a significant risk to machine integrity and operational efficiency. Early and reliable alert of MARFE formation is therefore essential for developing effective disruption mitigation strategies, particularly for next-generation devices like ITER. This paper presents a novel, physics-informed indicator for early MARFE prediction and disruption warning developed for the HL-3 tokamak. Our framework integrates two core innovations: (1) a high-fidelity label refinement pipeline that employs a physics-scored, weighted Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to systematically correct noise and artifacts in raw visual data from cameras, and (2) a continuous-time, physics-constrained Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (Neural ODE) model that predicts the short-horizon ``worsening" of a MARFE. By conditioning the model's dynamics on key plasma parameters such as normalized density ($f_G$, derived from core electron density) and core electron temperature ($T_e$), the predictor achieves superior performance in the low-false-alarm regime crucial for control. On a large experimental dataset from HL-3, our model demonstrates high predictive accuracy, achieving an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.969 for 40ms-ahead prediction. The indicator has been successfully deployed for real-time operation with updates every 1 ms. This work lays a very foundation for future proactive MARFE mitigation.