14th Technical Meeting on Control Systems, Data Acquisition, Data Management and Remote Participation in Fusion Research

Control, Data Acquisition and Communication at W7-X for the 2023/24 campaign (OP2.2)

16 Jul 2024, 09:20

20m

Instituto de Física da Universidade de São Paulo

Oral Machine Control, Monitoring, Safety and Remote Manipulation Machine Control, Monitoring, Safety and Remote Manipulation

Speaker

Axel Winter (Max Planck Institut für Plasmaphysik)

Description

The superconducting stellarator W7-X underwent a major overhaul between 2018-2022 with the installation of an actively cooled divertor and inner wall. The CoDaC System also received a significant overhaul and expansion. The central safety system was completely re-implemented with the lessons learned from previous operation phases and the new requirements of OP2.1. The protection of the new divertor required substantial enhancement of the Fast Interlock System which necessitated a new hardware infrastructure and new implementation.
The real-time system had to be ported from the existing VXworks implementation to a real-time linux, in order to accommodate the new divertor protection system.
The central configuration system had to be reworked in order to increase modularity and scalability to accommodate the numerous newly added plant. In addition to work on the central components of CoDaC, around 15 completely new diagnostic systems were implemented and another 20 were significantly enhanced. This included a new MicroTCA-based camera acquisition framework with now enables all cameras at W7-X (which support CameraLink, CameraLink HS and GigEVision) to run on the same hardware platform with minimal adaption of the software.
As W7-X is geared towards steady-state operation, all data has to be streamed to the archive and cannot be stored locally and uploaded at a later time. The addition of the >24 high-speed cameras required a substantial upgrade of the network streaming capacity and the central storage systems. In order to reduce the requirements as much as possible, a real-time lossless compression algorithm has been implemented for camera data, which was adapted to the W7-X environment yielding a >60% compression rate.
This paper will provide an overview of the changes and upgrades done to the W7-X CoDaC system from 2018-2022 and show results from the OP 2.1 campaign and provide an outlook of the upcoming operation phase 2.2 which is set to commence in the second half of 2024.