LULI, Palaiseau, France
Cilex-Apollon is a high intensity laser facility delivering at least 5 PW pulses on targets at one shot per minute, to study physics such as laser plasma electron or ion accelerator and laser plasma X-Ray sources. Under construction, Apollon is a four beam laser installation with two target areas. Apollon control system is based on Tango. The Synchronization and Security System (SSS) is the heart of this control system and has two main functions. First one is to deliver triggering signals to lasers sources and diagnostics and the second one is to ensure machine protection to guarantee optic components integrity by avoiding damages caused by abnormal operational modes. The SSS is composed of two distributed systems. Machine protection system is based on a distributed I/O system running a Labview real time application and the synchronization part is based on the distributed Greenfield Technology system. The SSS also delivers shots to the experiment areas through programmed sequences. The SSS are interfaced to Tango bus. The article presents the architecture, functionality, interfaces to others processes, performances and feedback from a first deployment on a demonstrator.
LULI, Palaiseau, France
Cilex-Apollon is a high intensity laser facility delivering at least 5 PW pulses on targets at one shot per minute, to study physics such as laser plasma electron or ion accelerator and laser plasma X-Ray sources. Under construction, Apollon is a four beam laser installation with two target areas. To control the laser beam characteristics and alignment, more than 75 CCD cameras and 100 motors are dispatched in the facility and controlled through a Tango bus. The image acquisition and display are made at 10 Hz. Different operations are made on line, at the same rate on acquired images like binarisation, centroid calculation, size and energy of laser beam. Other operations are made off line, on stored images. The beam alignment can be operated manually or automatically. The automatic mode is based on a close loop using a transfer matrix and can correct the laser beam centering and pointing 5 times per second. The article presents the architecture, functionality, performances and feedback from a first deployment on a demonstrator.