Tasks and structure of the WENDELSTEIN 7-X control system

The super-conducting stellarator Wendelstein 7-X is presently under construction at the Max-Planck-Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany. Assembly of the device is almost completed and the periphery systems and the diagnostic and heating systems are well advanced. Commissioning of the device has been prepared over the last two years and has started in April 2014. This is the first time since decades that a superconducting fusion device is commissioned in Europe.

Section: Role Of Codac In W7-x Commissioningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experience with the commissioning of the superconducting stellarator Wendelstein 7-X

Bosch

Bykov

Brakel

et al. 2015

“…These applications display the state of the operational management and provide control methods for elements not covered by the segment control system. This interface will generally be used by the technical operators [7,8,9]. …”

Section: Figure 1: Experiments Viewsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Common browsing and retrieval of technical and experimental data for steady state experiments

Bluhm

Heimann

Hennig

et al. 2009

Self Cite

Steady state experiments like Wendelstein 7-X have to deal with large amounts of data of different kind. Discharge lengths may last from less than a second up to 30 minutes. During this time diagnostics will measure data in different discharge phases with different rates depending on the physical program. Furthermore the technical configuration of all devices must be logged during the discharge as well as between experiment phases. This is necessary to allow supervision of constantly running devices. All measured data must be stored together in a common database to make it easily accessible and reduce the effort to combine data. Because of these requirements a continuous data acquisition system must be provided where data may exist at any time. Intelligent methods for browsing and retrieval of the acquired data from the common database are desired. This includes calendar based time interval selection, overview plots for intervals that cover several days and online views of the last stored data. The contribution will explain the challenges and the advantages induced by this kind of data access methods. Existing and planned solutions for Wendelstein 7-X will be depicted. Particularly the "Data Browser" -a graphical tool specially designed to fulfil these tasks at W7-X -will be presented.

“…The W7-X control system consists of a slow control branch built on PLCs for control of slow processes and operational management and a fast control system for forward and feedback control of plasma related components [3] [4]. The fast control stations use the real time operating system VxWorks and usually work on a 1 ms duty cycle.…”

Section: Tcp/ip Portal To the Databasementioning

confidence: 99%

Database structures and interfaces for W7-X

Heimann

Bluhm

Hennig

et al. 2008

The W7-X Experiment of the IPP, under construction in Greifswald Germany, is designed to operate in a quasi-steady-state scenario. The database structures and interfaces used for discharge description and execution have to reflect this continuous mode of operation. In close collaboration between the control group of W7-X and the data acquisition group a combined design of the data structures used for describing the configuration and the operation of the experiment was developed. To guarantee access to this information from all participating stations a TCP/IP portal and a proxy server were developed. This portal enables especially the VxWorks real-time operating systems of the control stations to access the information in the object-oriented database. The database schema includes now a more functional description of the experiment and gives the physicists a more simplified view of the necessary definitions of operational parameters. The scheduling of the long discharges of W7-X will be done by predefining operational parameters in segments and scenarios, where a scenario is a fixed sequence of segments with a common physical background. To hide the specialized information contained in the basic parameters from the experiment leader or physicist an abstraction layer was introduced that only shows physically interesting information. An executable segment will be generated after verifying the consistency of the high-level parameters by using a transformation function for every basic parameter needed. Since the database contains all configurations and discharge definitions necessary to operate the experiment, it is very important to give the user a tool to manipulate this information in an intuitive way. A special editor (ConfiX) was designed and implemented for this task. At the moment the basic functionality for dealing with all kind of objects in the database is available. Future releases will extend the functionality to defining and editing configurations, segments and scenarios with task specific versions.