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STFC Daresbury Laboratory has recently commissioned VELA (Versatile Electron Linear Accelerator), a high performance electron beam test facility. It will be used to deliver high quality, short pulse electron beams to industrial users to aid in the development of new products in the fields of health care, security, energy and waste processing and also to develop and test novel compact accelerator technologies. In the early stages of the design it was decided to use commercial Safety Network Controllers and I/O to implement the Personnel Safety System in place of the electro-mechanical relay-based system used on previous projects. This provides a high integrity, low cost solution while also allowing the design to be modular, programmable and easily expandable. This paper describes the design and realisation of the VELA Personnel Safety System and considers its future development. In addition, the application of the system to the protection of high-power laser systems and medical accelerators will also be discussed.
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