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 The current control system¿s hardware is obsolete and unmaintainable.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.
