Experimental Physics And Industrial Control System Software Research Articles

Upgrade of hardware controls for the STAR experiment at RHIC

The STAR experiment has been delivering significant physics results for more than 20 years. Stable operation of the experiment was achieved by using a robust controls system based on the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS). Now an object-oriented approach with Python libraries, adapted for EPICS software, is going to replace the procedural-based EPICS C libraries previously used at STAR. Advantages of the new approach include stability of operation, code reduction and straightforward project documentation. The first two sections of this paper introduce the STAR experiment, give an overview of the EPICS architecture, and present the use of Python for controls software. Specific examples, as well as upgrades of user interfaces, are outlined in the following sections.

Remote monitoring system for the cryogenic system of superconducting magnets in the SuperKEKB interaction region

A remote monitoring system was developed based on the software infrastructure of the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) for the cryogenic system of superconducting magnets in the interaction region of the SuperKEKB accelerator. The SuperKEKB has been constructed to conduct high-energy physics experiments at KEK. These superconducting magnets consist of three apparatuses, the Belle II detector solenoid, and QCSL and QCSR accelerator magnets. They are each contained in three cryostats cooled by dedicated helium cryogenic systems. The monitoring system was developed to read data of the EX-8000, which is an integrated instrumentation system to control all cryogenic components. The monitoring system uses the I/O control tools of EPICS software for TCP/IP, archiving techniques using a relational database, and easy human-computer interface. Using this monitoring system, it is possible to remotely monitor all real-time data of the superconducting magnets and cryogenic systems. It is also convenient to share data among multiple groups.

Serial Interface through Stream Protocol on EPICS Platform for Distributed Control and Monitoring

Remote operation of any equipment or device is implemented in distributed systems in order to control and proper monitoring of process values. For such remote operations, Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) is used as one of the important software tool for control and monitoring of a wide range of scientific parameters. A hardware interface is developed for implementation of EPICS software so that different equipment such as data converters, power supplies, pump controllers etc. could be remotely operated through stream protocol. EPICS base was setup on windows as well as Linux operating system for control and monitoring while EPICS modules such as asyn and stream device were used to interface the equipment with standard RS-232/RS-485 protocol. Stream Device protocol communicates with the serial line with an interface to asyn drivers. Graphical user interface and alarm handling were implemented with Motif Editor and Display Manager (MEDM) and Alarm Handler (ALH) command line channel access utility tools. This paper will describe the developed application which was tested with different equipment and devices serially interfaced to the PCs on a distributed network.

Implementation of an image acquisition and processing system based on FlexRIO, CameraLink and areaDetector

Image processing systems are commonly used in current physics experiments, such as nuclear fusion experiments. These experiments usually require multiple cameras with different resolutions, framerates and, frequently, different software drivers. The integration of heterogeneous types of cameras without a unified hardware and software interface increases the complexity of the acquisition system.This paper presents the implementation of a distributed image acquisition and processing system for CameraLink cameras. This system implements a camera frame grabber using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), a reconfigurable hardware platform that allows for image acquisition and real-time preprocessing.The frame grabber is integrated into Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) using the areaDetector EPICS software module, which offers a common interface shared among tens of cameras to configure the image acquisition and process these images in a distributed control system.The use of areaDetector also allows the image processing to be parallelized and concatenated using: multiple computers; areaDetector plugins; and the areaDetector standard type for data, NDArrays. The architecture developed is fully compatible with ITER Fast Controllers and the entire system has been validated using a camera hardware simulator that stream videos from fusion experiment databases.

Integrating EPICS and MDSplus

The National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) has been in operation at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) since 1999. Since then, NSTX has made use of the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) and MDSplus software packages, among others for control and data acquisition. To date, the two products have been integrated using special ‘bridging’ programs that include client-components for the EPICS and MDSplus servers. Recent improvements in the EPICS software have made it easier to develop a direct interface with MDSplus. This paper will describe the new EPICS extensions developed at PPPL that provide: (1) a direct data interface between EPICS process variables and MDSplus nodes; and (2) an interface between EPICS events and MDSplus events. These extensions have been developed for use with EPICS on Solaris and are currently being modified for use on real-time operating systems. Separately, an XML-RPC client was written to access EPICS ‘trended’ data, sampled usually once per minute during a 24 h period. The client extracts and writes a day's worth of trended data to a ‘daily’ MDSplus tree.

An overview of the information distribution system at the Advanced Photon Source

The Advanced Photon Source (APS) has been in operational mode for more than 5 yr. Currently there are over 40 beamlines in various phases of operation. The control system of choice at the APS is the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS). We have provided various interfaces to the beamlines from the APS control system. An overview of the various systems will be discussed. The General Control System Information (GCSI) uses dedicated computers as EPICS process variable gateways to provide data from the APS control system to each beamline. The GCSI architecture makes the APS control system secure, yet has the flexibility of providing access control to any data available on the APS control system. In addition, the gateway reduces the load on the APS control system equipment by making only one connection for each process variable accessed by multiple users. Each sector, consisting of a bending magnet and insertion device beamlines, is provided its own gateway, which resides on the local sector network. This scheme has the advantage of providing network security and more reliable operation. To provide real-time accelerator data to beamlines, each sector has been provided a chassis to display the storage ring current and other relevant information. These data are transmitted via a direct fiber link from the APS control system hardware to the beamlines. The beamlines are also provided VME-based hardware and associated EPICS software to retrieve key information provided via this fiber link. Some of the information on this link is beam current, lifetime, injection status, and sector specific information such as shutter status, insertion device gap, and energy, and storage ring and front-end beam position monitor signals. The data rates on this link are typically 10 Hz but can be as high as 272 kHz. This scheme allows the beamlines using EPICS-based software to seamlessly use the data from the APS control system without excessively impacting the system. For high-precision x-ray timing experiments, a new scheme has been designed to distribute the radio-frequency timing signals to the beamlines. Using VME-based hardware and EPICS software, the bunch clock signal is generated at the beamline for use in timing experiments. Data are provided at the radio frequency of 352 MHz. Beamlines have also been provided with hardware and software to generate the bunch clock signal for timing experiments.