Design and implementation of data acquisition system for magnets of SST-1

The magnet system of the Steady-State Superconducting Tokamak-1 at the Institute for Plasma Research, Gandhinagar, India, consists of sixteen toroidal field and nine poloidal field. Superconducting coils together with a pair of resistive PP coils, an air core ohmic transformer and a pair of vertical field coils. These magnets are instrumented with various cryogenic compatible sensors and voltage taps for its monitoring, operation, protection, and control during different machine operational scenarios like cryogenic cool down, current charging cycles including ramp up, flat top, plasma breakdown, dumping/ramp down and warm up. The data acquisition system for these magnet instrumentation have stringent requirement regarding operational flexibility, reliability for continuous long term operation and data visualization during operations. A VME hardware based data acquisition system with ethernet based remote system architecture is implemented for data acquisition and control of the complete magnet operation. Software application is developed in three parts namely an embedded VME target, a network server and a remote client applications. A target board application implemented with real time operating system takes care of hardware configuration and raw data transmission to server application. A java server application manages several activities mainly multiple client communication over ethernet, database interface and data storage. A java based platform independent desktop client application is developed for online and offline data visualization, remote hard ware configuration and many other user interface tasks. The application has two modes of operation to cater to different needs of cool-down and charging operations. This paper describes application architecture, installation and commissioning and operational experience from the recent campaigns of SST-1. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.