Abstract

Hard real-time control and data acquisition are critical for nuclear fusion experiments because of the very high rate (order of MHz) and amounts of signals and data to be acquired.

MARTe2 and MDSplus have been developed as free licensing tools and are now accepted as standards for the management of fusion experiments. Their integration indeed makes quite easy to manage the configuration and the setup of a nuclear fusion experiment while providing I/O interfacing, signal synchronization and data display, acquisition, offline retrieval and analysis capabilities.

As a tool for designing of real-time control systems MARTe2 makes easy to separate user and developer needs. From a user point-of-view indeed it offers an easy way to implement complex control loops by describing in a file the block-interconnection topology. From a developer point-of-view instead it makes software writing very easy by separating platform, environment and high-level software issues.

MDSplus is a set of tools devoted to scientific data storage and manipulation. It allows the developers to directly interface to the field I/O while providing end-users the capability to storage, view and post-processing a big amount of data as usually occurs in nuclear fusion experiments.

Integration of the two allows the development of fully-fledged control loops covering all the relevant areas from a lowest level (I/O interfacing) to the highest one (data display and offline post-processing) making easy to intervene at all levels.

Moreover, considering the bold separation with the existing hardware platforms of the two frameworks and the availability of early porting to commonly available microcontrollers wide scenarios open for their integration in scientific and industrial applications. With this approach control loop is separated from data storage and data display allowing and easy control and management of each single aspect of the whole process.

Promising tests were made as proof-of-concept, by running and interfacing the tools on different MCU family resulting in successful control schemes. Using a flight simulator platform, a simple control loop including engine RPM and flight surfaces control was developed. The experiment dealt with the development of multipurpose adapters I/O protocols and on the development of a simple PID controller tailored on control of aircraft in straight-and-level flight.

Trials were also made to include specific field peripherals (Analog-to-Digital converters, Pulse-Width-Modulation outputs, Digital-to-Analog outputs, UART communication) which could render the whole setup a control solution for field applications not limited to nuclear fusion experiments.

This content is only available via PDF.
You can access this article if you purchase or spend a download.