Equipment Protection System - EPS

What is it?

The Equipment Protection System or EPS is a control system in charge of protecting the machine and beamlines’ equipment from X-ray beam, or other hazards such as overpressure or overheating, which may damage the equipment or prevent proper operation.

The EPS performs two major tasks:

• Evaluate periodically the machine parameters, check their state,

• And in case of malfunction, bring the subsystem or the whole machine to prevent the machine or a subsystem from entering an inadmissible state or performing forbidden actions.

This is achieved by the means of interlocks, digital output signals that lock the system until predefined operating conditions are met. By periodically checking the machine parameters, they guarantee that in less than 24ms a potential error condition is detected and the corresponding output signal is generated.

Equipment connected to the EPS includes water flow meters, vacuum pressure and temperature sensors, radio frequency subsystem, Linac, ion pumps, spectrum analyzers, Brehmsstrahlung shutter, pneumatic valves, FS/OTR, compressed air, front-ends, radio frequency, magnets and power supplies.

The hardware of the EPS consists of 45 PCLs in total, distributed in the service area, the tunnel, the linac bunker and the beam lines. Each PLCs is equipped with input and output modules that receive and send analog and digital signals (interlocks) to the connected equipment.

On the software side, each PLC is supervised by ModBus with the TANGO server "AlbaPLC" and accessed via the EPS GUIs, allowing the control room to check and reset interlocks.