The Control System of the Elettra Booster Injector

A new injector made of a 100 MeV Linac and a 2.5 GeV booster ring is being built at ELETTRA to provide full energy injection into the storage ring in top-up mode. This project has required a novel design of the control system with the adoption of a new architecture and the use of up to date technologies, which will also be the basis of the control systems for future projects and accelerators upgrades. In this context, ELETTRA has adopted Tango as the control system software framework and has joined the Tango collaboration as a developer partner. The main aspects regarding the control system structure, the development of graphical user interfaces and the technical solutions adopted for the equipment interfaces are discussed. Use of industrial controllers for the interlock and personnel safety systems and their integration into the control system are also presented in this article. INTRODUCTION ELETTRA is the third generation synchrotron light source based in Trieste, Italy. Its present injector is an electron linear accelerator (Linac) working at a maximum energy of 1.2 GeV. During normal users operation electrons are injected at 0.9 GeV into the storage ring and ramped to 2 or 2.4 GeV depending on the users requirements. A refill is performed every 36 hours and typically lasts 40 minutes. The new injector will significantly increase machine stability and reliability and, above all, will allow for rapid refills that top-up the stored electron beam while keeping insertion devices and beamlines in operation. The full energy booster injector [1] is composed of a 100 MeV Linac pre-injector feeding a 3 Hz cycled booster synchrotron that matches the maximum energy of the storage ring, namely 2.5 GeV (Figure 1). It will be placed in the open space inside the present storage ring building. After the completion of the new injector, the existing Linac will become available for the FERMI@ELETTRA Free Electron Laser (FEL) facility [2], which is presently in the design phase. Figure 1: The ELETTRA facility with the new booster injector. ELETTRA is operating since 1992 with the original control system. VME crates with 68k CPU boards running the OS-9 operating system are used as field computers, while the operator consoles are Booster Synchrotron Linac Pre-Injector ELETTRA Storage Ring 10th ICALEPCS Int. Conf. on Accelerator & Large Expt. Physics Control Systems. Geneva, 10 14 Oct 2005, MO3.3-1O (2005)