Development and Integration of a Data Acquisition System for SST-1 Phase-1 Plasma Diagnostics

Abstract

Long pulse (of the order of 1000 s or more) SST-1 tokamak experiments demand a data acquisition system that is capable of acquiring data from various diagnostics channels without losing useful data (and hence physics information) while avoiding unnecessary generation of a large volume data. SST-1 Phase-1 tokamak operation has been envisaged with data acquisition of several essential diagnostics channels. These channels demand data acquisition at a sampling rate ranging from 1 kilo samples per second (KSPS) to 1 mega samples per second (MSPS). Considering the technical characteristics and requirements of the diagnostics, a data acquisition system based on PXI and CAMAC has been developed for SST-1 plasma diagnostics. Both these data acquisition systems are scalable. Present data acquisition needs involving slow plasma diagnostics are catered by the PXI based data acquisition system. On the other hand, CAMAC data acquisition hardware meets all requirements of the SST-1 Phase-1 fast plasma diagnostics channels. A graphical user interface for both data acquisition systems (PXI and CAMAC) has been developed using LabVIEW application development software. The collected data on the local hard disk are directly streaming to the central server through a dedicated network for post-shot data analysis. This paper describes the development and integration of the data acquisition system for SST-1 Phase-1 plasma diagnostics. The integrated testing of the developed data acquisition system has been performed using SST-1 central control and diagnostics signal conditioning units. In the absence of plasma shots, the integrated testing of the data acquisition system for the initial diagnostics of SST-1 Phase-1 operation has been performed with simulated physical signals. The primary engineering objective of this integrated testing is to validate the performance of the developed data acquisition system under simulated conditions close to that of actual tokamak operation. The data acquisition is synchronized with a clock and trigger provided by the central timing system.