Real-Time Fast Controller Prototype for J-TEXT Tokamak

Abstract

The operation of a tokamak device is highly sophisticated, which usually requires high performance real-time controllers. The ITER Control, Data Access and Communication (CODAC) team has made standards for Fast Controller (FC). Following the ITER CODAC standards we have designed the real-time FC (RTFC) prototype for J-TEXT.RTFC represents a general framework for controllers in both real-time control and diagnostic systems. The RTFC is designed to improve the development efficiency of real-time controller, and with minor modification it can be used in different applications. The RTFC main features are the PXI/PXIe bus with multi-core processor hardware, the Reflective-Memory, the IEEE-1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) support and LabVIEW real-time software. The proposed framework is capable of performing close-loop control with a time cycle below 1 ms. The RTFC supports the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) for both monitoring and system configuration. It can be easily integrated into J-TEXT CODAC system which is a newly developed control system for J-TEXT. This paper introduces the main features of the RTFC. The preliminary results obtained with the prototype of RTFC show the potential effectiveness of the proposed architecture.