LANL, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA
The Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) Proton Storage Ring (PSR) needs precise timing to ensure successful extraction of the bunched protons. The current control system¿s hardware is obsolete and unmaintainable. The task was to replace the 1980¿s era CAMAC control and timing system for the PSR extraction kickers. This included a system which halts charging of the kickers after a duration without firing to prevent equipment damage. A hybrid approach was taken to integrate a Berkeley Nucleonics Corporation (BNC) pulse generator that was controlled by a soft input/output controller (IOC) and National Instrument compact Reconfigurable Input/Output (cRIO) IOC. This allowed for flexibility and modularity of the software and hardware development. This approach built the framework to streamline robust deployment of hybrid systems and develop a solution for upgrades of other LANSCE kickers.
LANL, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA
The Los Alamos Neutron Science Center’s (LANSCE) Accelerator Operations and Technology division group executed a project that implemented a new analog front-end card (AFE) for their wire scanner’s Data Acquisition (DAQ) system. The AFE accommodates the signal amplification and noise reduction needed to acquire essential measurement data for beam diagnostics for the LANSCE accelerator. Wire Scanners are electro-mechanical beam interceptive devices that provide cross-sectional beam profile measurement data fitted to a Gaussian distribution that provides beam shape and position information. The beam operators use the beam shape and position information to adjust parameters such as acceleration, steering and focus on delivering an optimized beam to all targets. The project implemented software and hardware that eliminated the dependency on legacy systems and consolidated various AFE designs for diagnostics systems into a single design with 11 gain settings ranging from 100 nA to 40 mA at 10 V full scale to accommodate future applications on other diagnostic systems.