SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
The Klystron Bake Station at SLAC is a facility for baking out klystrons (high power RF amplifiers) among other equipment in preparation for installation in the linac. The scope of this project was to upgrade the 30 year old controls (based on VMS and CAMAC) to utilize PLC automation and an EPICS user interface. The new system allows for flexible configuration of the bake out schedule which can be saved to files or edited real time both through an EPICS soft IOC as well as a local touch panel HMI. Other improvements include active long term archiving of all data, COTS hardware (replacing custom-built CAMAC cards), email notification of fault states, and graphical user interfaces (old system was command line only). The first station upgraded came online in November 2016 and two more stations are planned to follow this year. Year poster discusses the improvements made and problems encountered in performing the upgrade.
