Consorzio RFX, Padova, Italy
IPFN, Lisbon, Portugal
F4E, Barcelona, Spain
Tokamaks use heating neutral beam (HNB) injectors to reach fusion conditions and drive the plasma current. ITER, the large international tokamak, will have three high-energy, high-power (1MeV, 16.5MW) HNBs. MITICA, the ITER HNB prototype, is being built at the ITER Neutral Beam Test Facility, Italy, to develop and test the ITER HNB, whose requirements are far beyond the current HNB technology. MITICA operates in a pulsed way with pulse duration up to 3600s and 25% duty cycle. It requires a complex control and data acquisition system (CODAS) to provide supervisory and plant control, monitoring, fast real-time control, data acquisition and archiving, data access, and operator interface. The control infrastructure consists of two parts: central and plant system CODAS. The former provides high-level resources such as servers and a central archive for experimental data. The latter manages the MITICA plant units, i.e., components that generally execute a specific function, such as power supply, vacuum pumping, or scientific parameter measurements. CODAS integrates various technologies to implement the required functions and meet the associated requirements. Our paper presents the CODAS requirement and architecture based on the experience gained with SPIDER, the ITER full-size beam source in operation since 2018. It focuses on the most challenging topics, such as synchronization, fast real-time control, software development for long-lasting experiments, system commissioning, and integration.
