Hi Pavel,
Nuclear power plants are probably not the place where you can learn how
to build and maintain a control system. The strict approval process
of such a facility usually does not allow to change things once it is
running. The same is true for medical facilities, by the way. At a
particle accelerator one can be more "experimental". The machine
constantly changes even after years of operation, for example when user
beamlines are added or upgraded. Thus, the control system must be
modified, too.
If you want get more knowledge of the EPICS internals, I suggest to put
away CSS for a while and get into the 'command line cuisine' as you
called it. Compile EPICS on your own PC and start playing. For example
write a simulation of your power supplies and put the logic into records
instead of the PLC. Such a project requires more than the monolayer of
records you often get when interfacing with a PLC. You will soon reach a
challenging complexity.
Or get a real device and control it. If you don't have hardware like VME
crates, ADCs and so on to play with, a serial, USB or network interface
will do, too.
Maybe you can convince someone at your institute to set up the test
bench for the power supplies with EPICS and implement a automatic test
system?
In terms of formal education a course on plasma physics, nuclear physics
or similar at university level can provide a sound background of what
ITER is actually supposed to do. This is much more helpful than a list
of specifications, because at the end you do not just want to control a
power supply, you want to control a nuclear reaction.
Unfortunately, formal education on control systems simply does not exist.
Pavel Masloff wrote:
Hi Dirk,
Nice to hear from you again. You are right. Exactly. One should first of
all understand the control object. Did you work on the control system
all by yourself? Is it operating now?
By the time I started with the control system, there were 4 people
working on it. Three of them PhD students (two left the institute during
the next year) and one who became operations manager at about the same
time. Later two other diploma students joined the group.
At that time the control system was completely written in-house and had
no GUI. Only command line read and write commands. At about the same
time we got fist beam in the booster ring and found out quickly that the
control system needs much more features. We all had to run shifts in the
control room so we got a first hand experience of what was missing.
So we, that is the 4 diploma and PhD students, decided to migrate the
control system to EPICS (version R3.13.0Beta12). That migration took
about one year and involved writing drivers as well as building the
logic for all types of devices used in an accelerator and finally
writing automated measurement and optimization programs. And GUIs of
course. Luckily, the old system was already based on VME and vxWorks,
the only choice for EPICS at that time.
One can learn a lot during this process, especially what to avoid. But I
can say it was never the control system that delayed progress. More
often we had hardware problems. So we had plenty of time to experiment
with the software. Many parts of the control system were actually
written during shifts whenever new features were needed or problems were
found. And yes, of course it is operating now.
Best regards,
Dirk
Control room! Absolutely! I was once in the control room of our nuclear
power plant in St. Petersburg. But it was more like an excursion rather
than continuous work. I am more interested not in the HMI, though, but
the underlying software, how signals are acquired, transferred and
processed, system architecture, which sensors to use, how to link
hardware with, say, EPICS.
I would like to work at some European or American lab to get some
experience before 2020 when we are supposed to deliver our equipment to
Cadarache. The thing is I don't have enough qualification, again, to
qualify. There is annual EPICS collaboration meeting. Perhaps, this
might be a good experience. Since it's not taught in college, as Ned
Arnold pointed out.
Regards,
Pavel
On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 12:54 PM, Dirk Zimoch <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi Pavel,
In my experience it is more important to understand the application,
i.e. the machine and physics, than to have a degree in any field of
computer science. I have a degree in physics and am more or less
autodidact in programing. I came in contact with control systems and
real time computing when I started my diploma thesis on accelerator
physics. I was lucky that we had an electron synchrotron at our
university at Dortmund, Germany. I worked on the control system
during my diploma and PhD work.
When developing control system applications, I found it extremely
useful to have an understanding of the machine and underlying
physics. Another key to successfully develop control system
applications is to work in a control room or a working machine for
several months and be user of the control system. Then you learn
best what machine operators really need.
Best wishes,
Dirk
Pavel Masloff wrote:
Dear colleagues!
A rather off-topic question to you. I would appreciate to hear
your answers, comments, advice.
I would love to get a Master's degree in the field specifically
related to what YOU guys do: EPICS, DAQ, creating interfaces for
scientific installations, writing drivers for hardware, linking
it to software, you name it. I have gotten a Bachelor's and a
Master's degrees in /Robotics /and /Automation and Control
/respectively. But, truth be told, the knowledge that I got
(general, I'd say, mediocre) doesn't have a lot to do with all
the work YOU do and which is yet to be done by me (as I have
decided) in my career as Control/Software Engineer.
Why would I need this? I am employed by the Efremov institute,
and our laboratory develops coil-power supply systems for the
ITER project (http://www.iter.org). I am responsible for the
control part. Here at the Institute I have all the opportunities
to gain knowledge related to electrical processes, apparatus, we
have got decent pulsed-power facilities, great engineers and
just nice people. However, the software/control area is
undeveloped and we lack software specialists who I can learn
from. Imagine, we are doing an international project, the level
of the hardware, say, is decent. OK. But in terms of software, I
must confess, we are not on the world level, which grieves me,
to be honest. Of course, I would like our institute to
competently fulfill Russia’s commitments towards ITER.
For this reason, I want to get a higher-education with focus on
software design, possibly science-oriented. Let me say a few
words about our contribution to ITER so as it will be clear
enough for you to understand what I need. As I mentioned, our
laboratory's scope of work includes creating coil-power supply
systems. One of the key function is to protect the TF, PF, CS,
CC coils by fast discharge of stored energy in case of a quench
or other type of fault event. Briefly, the information from the
sensors is processed by the Siemens S7 controllers, the time
sequence for the actuators (bypass switch, vaccuum
circuit-breaker, counter-pulse capacitor banks, pyrobreaker) is
realized by Siemens FM352 Fast Boolean processor. Our plant
system has to interact with the so-called CODAC control system,
which is based upon EPICS and CSS. Additionally, we have to
provide fast data for plasma stabilization.
With this in mind, as a developer, generally, I am not supposed
to know all the 'command line cuisine' - there is the CSS
framework, go program your PLCs and connect them to CODAC in
compliance with a readme. I had done it already and I want to go
beyond that.
I know there are lots of you on the list who are actually in
charge of CODAC, there are many guys from the US national
research laboratories. My message is addressed to you in the
first place. I would love it if you would tell me:
* what did you study (or studying) in college and where?
* which courses/classes do you find had helped you in your
current work?
* do you know any programs that provide sort of internships at
national laboratories? (would be great if they were related
to ITER)
What are your thoughts about getting the required knowledge at
university (the other option would be working at a lab without
getting a degree)? In case of the latter where can one get such
experience?
Thank you and I look forward to hearing from you!
--
Sincerely,
Pavel Maslov, MS
Junior Control Engineer / Power Pulsed Lab.
Efremov Institute for Electro-Physical Apparatus
St. Petersburg, Russia
--
Sincerely,
Pavel Maslov, MSc
R&D Institute for Electro-Physical Apparatus
Mobile: +7 (951) 672 22 19
Phone: +7 (812) 461 01 01
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