Development of Hard-wired Instrumentation and Control for the Neutral Beam Test Facility at KAERI

Abstract

Since the start of the KSTAR (Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research) project, Instrumentation and Control (I&C) of the Neutral Beam Test Facility (NB-TF) has been striving to answer diverse requests arising from various facets during the project's development and construction phases. Hard-wired electrical circuits have been designed, tested, fabricated, and finally installed to the relevant parts of the system. In relation to the vacuum system I&C, controlling functions for the rotary pumps, a Roots pump, two turbomolecular pumps, and four cryosorption pumps have been constructed. I&C for the ion source operation are the temperature and flow rate signal monitoring, Langmuir probe signal measurements, gradient grid current measurements, and arc detector circuit. For the huge power system to be monitored or safely operated, many temperature measurement functions have also been implemented for the beam line components like the neutralizer, bending magnet, ion dump, and calorimeter. Nearly all of the control and probe signals between the NB test stand and the control room were made to be transmitted through the optical cables. Failures of coolant flow or beam line vacuum pressure were made to be safely blocked from influencing the system by an appropriate interlock circuit that will shut down the extraction voltage application to the system or prevent damages to the vacuum components. Preliminary estimation of the beam power through the calorimetric measurement shows that 87.9% of the total power of the 60kV/18A beam with 200 seconds duration is absorbed by the calorimeter surface. Most of these I&C results would be highly appropriate for the construction of the main NBI facility for the KSTAR national fusion research project.