R. Castro

Advanced Data Acquisition system implementation for the ITER neutron diagnostic use case using EPICS and FlexRIO technology on a PXIe platform

To aid in assessing the functional performance of ITER, Fission Chambers (FC) based on the neutron diagnostic use case deliver timestamped measurements of neutron source strength and fusion power. To demonstrate the Plant System Instrumentation & Control (I&C) required for such a system, ITER Organization (IO) has developed a neutron diagnostics use case that fully complies with guidelines presented in the Plant Control Design Handbook (PCDH). The implementation presented in this paper has been developed on the PXI Express (PXIe) platform using products from the ITER catalog of standard I&C hardware for fast controllers. Using FlexRIO technology, detector signals are acquired at 125 MS/s, while filtering, decimation, and three methods of neutron counting are performed in real-time via the onboard Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Measurement results are reported every 1 ms through Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) Channel Access (CA), with real-time timestamps derived from the ITER Timing Communication Network (TCN) based on IEEE 1588-2008. Furthermore, in accordance with ITER specifications for CODAC Core System (CCS) application development, the software responsible for the management, configuration, and monitoring of system devices has been developed in compliance with a new EPICS module called Nominal Device Support (NDS) and RIO/FlexRIO design methodology.

Implementation of ITER Fast Plant Interlock System Using FPGAs With CompactRIO

Interlocks are the instrumented functions of ITER that protect the machine against failures of the plant system components or incorrect machine operation. Regarding instrumentation and control, the interlock control system (ICS) ensures that no failure of the conventional ITER controls can lead to a serious damage of the machine integrity or availability. The ICS is in charge of the supervision and control of all the ITER components involved in the instrumented protection of the tokamak and its auxiliary systems. It is constituted by the central interlock system (CIS), different plant interlock systems (PISs), and its networks. The ICS does not include the sensors and actuators of the plant systems, but it is in charge of their control. The ITER interlock system shall be designed, built, and operated according to the highest quality standards. The international standard IEC-61508 has been chosen as the reference. In both CIS and PIS cases, two main architectures are used: 1) a slow architecture, for those functions with response time requirements slower than 100 ms (300 ms for central interlock functions), based on programmable logic controller technologies and 2) a fast architecture, based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) technologies, for the functions with faster requirement times. The proposed design for fast PIS is based on the use of reconfigurable input/output (RIO) technology from National Instruments (NI CompactRIO platform). In order to provide a high integrity solution, failure modes, effects, and diagnostic analysis (FMEDA) has been conducted to analyze the component behavior. According to the output of the FMEDA, a set of diagnostics has been defined and additional redundancy was added to the architecture to improve the integrity figures. The defined configuration has been called the “double-decker solution,” with two chassis running in parallel, communicated between them using a synchronous high-speed serial line, and using redundant modules to implement the input and output measurements/excitations and redundant analog and digital modules to implement the diagnostics of these input/output modules. The integrity figures for the “double-decker” solution are obtained from the classification of the failure rates, obtaining for different configurations a safe failure fraction of 85% and a probability of dangerous failure per hour of less than 1E−07. The FPGA design includes all the hardware to support the data acquisition from the input modules, the implementation of the diagnostic functionalities for analog and digital modules, the voting schema, and the activation/deactivation of digital outputs. The platform includes an external test platform, also based on NI CompactRIO technology, to perform the validation of the system and to register the performance of different interlock functions implemented. The response time obtained for the transistor–transistor logic (TTL) input to TTL output interlock function ranges from 5 to

EFDA‐fed: European federation among fusion energy research laboratories

20~\mu \text{s}

Optimised search strategies to improve structural pattern recognition techniques

; for the analog input to TTL output, the response time is in the range of 41–

An authentication and authorization infrastructure: The PAPI system

90~\mu \text{s}

Overview of the TJ-II remote participation system

, and for interlock functions using 24-V digital input to 24-V digital output, the time can rise up to

Implementation of Intelligent Data Acquisition Systems for Fusion Experiments Using EPICS and FlexRIO Technology

643~\mu \text{s}

Overview of intelligent data retrieval methods for waveforms and images in massive fusion databases

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PAPI based federation as a test-bed for a common security infrastructure in EFDA sites

Purpose – The fusion energy research in Europe is developed by a set of laboratories of different countries and organisations. EFDA is an organisation whose main objective is to promote and improve the coordination and collaboration among these laboratories. This paper sets out to describe a working federation (EFDA‐Fed) that gathers EFDA (as organisation) and a set of fusion research laboratories: EURATOM/CIEMAT (Spain), CEA (France), JET (UK), IST (Portugal) and KFKI/HAS (Hungary).Design/methodology/approach – To achieve the objective a federation among all the organisations has been implemented based on PAPI as the authentication and authorization infrastructure that provides a security layer for accessing data among organisations.Findings – During the implementation of EFDA federation some improvements in distributed single sign on systems have been achieved such as the integration of JAVA applications and a single sign off mechanism.Practical implications – Users who belong to one of the federated or...

Hardware Timestamping for an Image Acquisition System Based on FlexRIO and IEEE 1588 v2 Standard

Data retrieval methods are based on three essential aspects: feature extraction (to reduce signal dimensionality), the classification system (to index objects according to some criteria) and similarity measures (to compare how similar two objects are); but there is not a single solution to handle these key elements. This paper provides a new solution to the localisation and extraction of similar patterns in time-series data. Alternative searches are proposed to objectively increase the recognition of similar patterns so as to achieve better results on the data retrieval. These search strategies have been studied with excellent results in the detection of long subpatterns. Long subpatterns are not very easy to identify since even a single mismatch in one character can compromise similarity between two patterns. Identifying long patterns in a fast, fault-tolerant and intelligent way is the aim of the analysed strategies, which are formally based on statistical criteria and some aspects of probability theory.