LANL, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA
Recent upgrades to the Instrumentation and Control System at Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) have significantly improved its maintainability and performance. These changes were the first strategic steps towards a larger vision to standardize the hardware form factors and software methodologies. Upgrade efforts are being prioritized though a risk-based approach and funded at various levels. With a major recapitalization project finished in 2022 and modernization project scheduled to start possibly in 2025, current efforts focus on the continuation of upgrade efforts that started in the former and will be finished in the later time frame. Planning and executing these upgrades are challenging considering that some of the changes are architectural in nature, however, the functionality needs to be preserved while taking advantage of technology progressions. This is compounded by the fact that those upgrades can only be implemented during the annual 4-month outage. This paper will provide an overview of our vision, strategy, challenges, recent accomplishments, as well as future planned activities to transform our 50-year-old control system into a modern state-of-the-art design.
LA-UR-23-24389
LANL, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA
The Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) operates at a maximum repetition rate of 120 Hz. Timing gates are required for synchronization of the accelerator to provide beam acceleration along the LINAC and beam distribution to the five experimental areas. They are also provided to other devices with sensitive operating points relative to the machine cycle. Over the last 50 years of operations many new time sensitive pieces of equipment have been added. This has changed the demand on, and complexity of, the timing system. Further driven by equipment obsolescence issues, the timing system un-derwent many upgrades and revitalization efforts, with the most significant deployment starting in 2016. Due to these upgrade efforts, the timing system architecture design changed from a purely centralized system, to a distributed event-based one. The purpose of this paper is to detail the current state of the timing system, as a hy-brid system with the gate events being generated from a new timing master system, while still utilizing legacy distribution and fanout systems. Upgrades to the distribu-tion system are planned, but due to the required beam delivery schedule, they can only be deployed in sections during four-month annual maintenance cycles. The paper will also cover the off-the-shelf solutions that have been found for standardization, and the efforts towards a life cycle management process.
LA-UR-23-31123
