Experimental Physics And Industrial Control System Research Articles

Control System Implementation for the IASA Microtron

A progress report on the architectural design and implementation of the Control System for the Racetrack Microtron at the Institute of Accelerating Systems and Applications (IASA) in Athens, Greece is presented. The Control System for the IASA CW Microtron is being developed on the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) environment. Since top priority for this project is the construction and commissioning of the Mcrotron's injector, emphasis is being given to the definition and refinement of the Control Architecture and its realization for the injector. The experience gained from the Control System at the injector will guide the further development of the Control System for the entire Microtron.

First neutron data recorded at the V20 Test Instrument utilizing prototype chopper systems and beam monitors planned for ESS

The main objective of the European Spallation Source (ESS) is to perform consistently high impact neutron scattering science using the highest neutron flux of any facility in its class. This ambition is naturally accompanied by operational challenges related to the vertical integration of the instruments' hardware and software shared between collaborators from 13 European countries. The present work will detail integration tests performed at the V20 Test Instrument at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin in Germany. An ESS chopper prototype was successfully controlled through the ESS Chopper Integration Controller (CHIC) and Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS). Neutron data were successfully collected and timestamped using neutron beam monitors, the ESS prototype detector readout electronics and the Data Management Software Center (DMSC) data acquisition (DAQ) software. Chopper rotation events were timestamped and the chopper disk showed excellent stability and neutron absorption characteristics. The test resulted in i) the expected time-of-flight (TOF) response, ii) collected data that compared well with instrument reference data and iii) revealing the diagnostic power of the performed integration tests. The results of this integration test validate the ESS chopper and detector DAQ architecture choices.

Alarm system of IRFEL at NSRL

An InfraRed Free Electron Laser Light (IRFEL) is under commissioning at National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (NSRL). The control system of IRFEL is a distributed system based on Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS). The alarm system is an essential part of the control system. It is developed based on the software Phoebus. The module named “Alarms” in Phoebus can store states and configuration information of the Process Variable (PV) in the Kafka topics. To meet our requirements, 3 kinds of alarm message distribution applications are developed, i.e. Web-Based GUI, WeChat and SMS. This paper will introduce the alarm system architecture and the implementations of the applications for alarm message distribution.

Alarm system of IRFEL at NSRL

An InfraRed Free Electron Laser Light (IRFEL) is under commissioning at National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (NSRL). The control system of IRFEL is a distributed system based on Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS). The alarm system is an essential part of the control system. It is developed based on the software Phoebus. The module named Alarms in Phoebus can store states and configuration information of the Process Variable (PV) in the Kafka topics. To meet our requirements, 3 kinds of alarm message distribution applications are developed, i.e. Web-Based GUI, WeChat and SMS. This paper will introduce the alarm system architecture and the implementations of the applications for alarm message distribution.

Control and Diagnostic System for CFETR CSMC Testing Platform

The central solenoid model coil (CSMC) of the China Fusion Engineering Testing Reactor (CFETR) is currently in the manufacturing phase. Once completed, the CSMC will be tested on a testing platform. The testing platform is composed of several subsystems, which are coordinated by a control system to conduct a successful experiment and collect scientific data generated during the experiments. A diagnostic system is employed for the purpose of monitoring the status of a superconducting magnet and triggers the alarm system if an abnormal signal has been detected. The central control system of the CSMC testing platform is called the control data access and communication (CODAC) system. In order to realize the normal data communication between the CODAC system and a subsystem, an experimental physics and industrial control system (EPICS) Channel Access (CA) protocol is needed.

A Channel Access Software Platform for Beam Dynamics Applications in Scripting Languages

To facilitate the seamless integration of EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) into high-level applications in particle accelerators, a dedicated modern C++ Channel Access interface library, CAFE, provides a comprehensive and user- friendly interface to the underlying control system. Functionality is provided for synchronous and asynchronous interaction of single and composite groups of channels, coupled with an abstract layer tailored towards beam dynamics applications and complex modelling of virtual accelerators. Equivalent consumable solutions in scripting and domain-specific languages can then be accelerated by providing bindings to the relevant methods of the interface platform. This is exemplified by CAFE's extensive MATLAB® interface, incarnated through a single MATLAB executable (MEX) file, and a high performance Python interface written in the Cython programming language. A number of gratifying particularities specific to these language extension modules are revealed.

Run and slow control system of the Belle II silicon vertex detector

The Belle II Silicon Vertex Detector (SVD) was installed recently and has been prepared for physics run at SuperKEKB factory, Tsukuba, Japan. For a reliable operation and data taking of the SVD, a sophisticated and robust run and slow control system has been implemented, which utilizes the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) framework. EPICS uses client/server and publish/subscribe techniques to communicate between the various sub-systems and computers. The information exchange between the different pieces of software and computers is done by process variables (PVs). These PVs are provided by input/output controllers (IOCs), which communicate and interface with the hardware components. The Belle II SVD slow and run control comprises five groups of subsystems, which are SVD DAQ controller, Flash ADC controller, environmental monitors and interlocks, power supplies and EPICS infrastructure services. In this paper we describe the tasks and the implementation of the individual sub-systems, the interaction between them and the global Belle II run and slow control as well as the first experience from commissioning and initial operation of the SuperKEKB accelerator.

A digital feedback control and real-time monitoring system of PF coil power supplies for HL-2A

An upgrade to the magnet power digital feedback system (DFS) for the real time control of the PF coil power supplies is currently being developed and commissioned in HL-2A. The system aims to perform higher control resolution, more stable control cycle, real time monitoring and protection. The DFS has been shown to have better performance than the existing system in the control of the PF coil power supplies. It can control effectively all the PF coil power supplies, including the ohmic heating power supply (OHPS), vertical field power supply (VFPS), radial field power supply (RFPS) and the divertor coil power supply (DCPS). Meanwhile, the high-speed data transmission with reflective memory is used to transfer the control parameters of the PF coil power supplies. Moreover, the DFS also provides the real time monitor and protection based on the experimental physics and industrial control system (EPICS).

Preliminary design of I&C for ITER radial X-ray camera system based on CODAC

The Radial X-ray Camera (RXC), as an important diagnostic system among more than one hundred ones in ITER Tokamak, is used to measure the poloidal profile of plasma X-ray emission with high spatial and temporal resolution. The automatic and safe operation of RXC will require a reliable and rugged Instrumentation and Control (I&C) system which is used to monitor and control, acquire and process data and design operation procedures. The I&C has been preliminarily designed based on ITER CODAC (COntrol, Data Access and Communication) architecture and ITER-PCDH (Plant Control Design Handbook) Journeaux, [1] guidelines since the technical understanding of CODAC technology was helpful in development of plant system I&C for RXC.The monitor and the control functions, which were implemented by Slow Controller (SC) using PLC (Programmable Logic Controller), manage the slow signals such as status of various sensors, parameters of amplifiers, temperature of detectors and health status of cubicle. Data acquisition and data processing, which were realized by Fast Controller (FC) utilizing EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System), are responsible for collection of raw signal from detectors, data archiving, data calculation through algorithmic and publishing to PCS (Plasma Control System). A state machine was developed to coordinate the execution of operation steps of RXC. The prototype I&C system for RXC was successfully tested on Mini−CODAC.

Design of Real-Time Control in Poloidal Field Power Supply Based on Finite-State Machine

This paper clearly demonstrates the structure of Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) power supply system and analyzes principles of the finite-state machine (FSM) elaborately. Depending on the characteristics of EAST power supply system and the requirements of it, this paper chooses the real-time Linux as system platform and experimental physics and industrial control system (EPICS) as development tool to design a control system of the EAST poloidal field power system supply. This paper utilizes a temporal logic control based on the FSM in order to regulate the operation process of real-time sequence logic control of 12 sets of power controllers. This design is evaluated and tested, and it completely meets the real-time requirement of the poloidal field power supply (PFPS) control system. Several experiments have proved that this design definitely meets the real-time sequence logic control requirement of the PFPS control system in the complex situations under magnetic fields.

The high level application architecture of the control system for SHINE

Shanghai HIgh repetition rate XFEL aNd Extreme light facility(SHINE) is a quasi-continuous wave hard X-ray free electron laser facility, which is currently under construction. Such kind of accelerators typically comprise more than hundreds of devices, and control systems are required to manage all the devices in a uniform manner. The control system of SHINE will be based on Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) with a dedicated high-speed data channel and an integrated information system to fulfill the requirement of high repetition rate. Then the high level control applications are designed to hold the information base as well as a set of cooperating services for data access. Modular design is utilized to simplify development and deployment. Modules of parameter and lattice/model are introduced as examples.

Automatic data archiving and visualization at HLS-II

The control system of Hefei Light Source II (HLS-II) is a distributed system based on the experimental physics and industrial control system (EPICS). It is necessary to maintain the central configuration files for the existing archiving system. When the process variables in the control system are added, removed, or updated, the configuration files must be manually modified to maintain consistency with the control system. This paper presents a new method for data archiving, which realizes the automatic configuration of the archiving parameters. The system uses microservice architecture to integrate the EPICS Archiver Appliance and RecSync. In this way, the system can collect all the archived meta-configuration from the distributed input/output controllers and enter them into the EPICS Archiver Appliance automatically. Furthermore, we also developed a web-based GUI to provide automatic visualization of real-time and historical data. At present, this system is under commissioning at HLS-II. The results indicate that the new archiving system is reliable and convenient to operate. The operation mode without maintenance is valuable for large-scale scientific facilities.

Beam-based optimization of SwissFEL low-level RF system

SwissFEL is a free electron laser (FEL) under commissioning at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) in Switzerland. Digital low-level RF (LLRF) systems are used in SwissFEL to control more than 30 RF stations with either standing wave cavities (e.g. RF gun) or travelling wave structures working at different frequencies. After conditioned to desired power levels, the RF stations need to be setup for beam operation and the LLRF parameters need to be optimized for maximizing the beam stability. Several beam-based algorithms were developed to facilitate the setup, calibration and optimization of the SwissFEL RF stations for beam operation. The algorithms were implemented as automation procedures in the framework of Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) and were used in commissioning and daily operation of SwissFEL. In this paper, the algorithms and the implementation will be introduced together with the test results during the commissioning of SwissFEL.

Embedded EPICS Control System of Hight Voltage Power Supply for Extraction Deflector on HIRFL-CSR

Control system of HIRFL-CSR accelerator is now upgrading to new architecture based on Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS), a control sub-system of High Voltage (HV) for slow extraction on CSRm must be redesigned with the new architecture. The hardware of the new system based on a high-performance FPGA controller. Researched on embedded EPICS technology and implemented core function of the sub-system based on the technology. This paper describes the design and implementation of the new control system.

Design and Implementation of HL-2A Host Centralized Control System FSM Model Based on EPICS

Based on the finite-state machine (FSM) theory, a method of HL-2A host centralized control system FSM model for achieving centralized control and management is proposed. This method integrates all subcontrol systems and realizes interlock protection between subsystems. The tool of stateflow combined with Simulink is adopted to achieve the aided design and dynamic simulation of the FSM model. In-depth development of Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS), sequencer toolkit is taken to realize the FSM model-specific operation. The result indicates that the FSM model can run on the EPICS platform successfully and establish significant basis for design of the next-generation device host centralized control system.

The cooling test platform design for iter radial x-ray camera

The Radial X-ray Camera (RXC) is a diagnostic in Equatorial Port 12 (EQ#12) of International Thermonuclear Experimental: Reactor (ITER). Normally, the operating temperature of detector on RXC system shall be lower than 75 °C. But the detectors on some part of RXC system will have to face a high temperature of 250 °C during baking of ITER, as a result of which case detectors will be easily damaged. Due to the harsh environment, cooling for RXC system is necessary. In order to verify the effect of gas cooling, the related research and experiments are being carried out.This article focuses on the analysis of the architecture and heat transfer capacities of the cooling test platform. According to the analysis results, the solution of the cooling platform is introduced and a cooling test platform is established. Also, a Data Acquisition (DAQ) system is developed based on Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) framework. The experiment results based on the cooling test platform provide support for the cooling system design of RXC system.

FPGA-Based Solutions for Analog Data Acquisition and Processing Integrated in Area Detector Using FlexRIO Technology

Analog data acquisition systems used for diagnostics and control of large physics experiments require high sampling rates and real-time processing functionalities. The use of field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based devices allows efficient implementation of such solutions. Currently, large scientific facilities are using middleware platforms to simplify system integration. Experimental physics and industrial control system (EPICS) is one of the most popular middleware for this purpose. Moreover, heterogeneous hardware integration in these systems is a very complex task, and different approaches attempting to standardize this integration are under development and use. One of these approaches is areaDetector (AD), which involves an open source module for EPICS that is primarily used for image acquisition applications. AD simplifies the integration of heterogeneous image acquisition systems, providing a common interface between the hardware and EPICS. The AD community has already developed support for different cameras and communication protocols as well as different processing modules, including conversion to the most commonly used image formats. AD has also been used in some analog signal acquisition systems; for example, quadEM is typically used for a photodiode-based X-ray beam, but there are no implementations based on FPGA, such as FlexRIO technology. This paper presents the integration of acquisition and processing solution in a PXIe platform using the FlexRIO technology using a model that solves the acquisition and signal processing in an FPGA and a software layer implemented in C++ with the IRIO library (open source solution for RIO devices in the Linux environment).

Development of a real-time data archive system for a KSTAR real-time network

This paper presents the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) Real-Time Data Archiving System (RTDAS) for a real-time network. In most fusion experiments, a stable and low latency real-time network is essential for achieving real-time controllability. Inspecting and supervising the operation of a real-time network is essential for ensuring its stability. Archiving the network data makes it possible to analyze the performance and status of a network. In the KSTAR, RTDAS has been developed to monitor and archive real-time network data that is used to control the plasma and send diagnostic data to Plasma Control System (PCS) in real-time to ensure the stable operation of the real-time network. The KSTAR adopts reflective memory (RFM) as a real-time network and this paper presents the algorithm of the real-time data archiving system and the experimental results of this system. The real-time data archiving system operates in two phases. During the experiment, the archiving system stores data from these real-time networks in real-time. After the experiment is finished the system sends this archived data to the MDSplus data server; this system stores all data in accordance with the KSTAR timing system. Therefore, all data is synchronized with the KSTAR timing system. This system is configured with Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) and Asynchronous Driver Support (AsynDriver). This system operates in real-time, was implemented on Messaging Realtime Grid -Real time (MRG-R) kernel 3.10, and uses Multi-Core Utilities (MCoreUtil). The system was tested to validate the performance of this archiving system; the test results show this system’s real-time performance.

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.

Use of PROFIBUS for cryogenic instrumentation at XFEL

The European X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) is a research facility and since December 2016 under commissioning at DESY in Hamburg. The XFEL superconducting accelerator is 1.5 km long and contains 96 superconducting accelerator modules. The control system EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) is used to control and operate the XFEL cryogenic system consisting of the XFEL refrigerator, cryogenic distribution systems and the XFEL accelerator. The PROFIBUS fieldbus technology is the key technology of the cryogenic instrumentation and the link to the control system. More than 650 PROFIBUS nodes are implemented in the different parts of the XFEL cryogenic facilities. The presentation will give an overview of PROFIBUS installation in these facilities regarding engineering, possibilities of diagnostics, commissioning and the first operating experience.