Superconducting Coil Winding Machine Control System

The Spirex magnet coil winder has been equipped with an automation system, which allows operation from both a computer and a remote control unit. This machine is about 6m long with a bridge that moves along a track and supports a rotating boom holding a spool of cable and providing cable tension. The machine control system is distributed between three layers: PC, RTOS, and FPGA providing respectively HMI, operational logic and controls. The PC stores the history of operation, shows the machine positions, status, and their history. Keeping cable tension constant is non-trivial in situations where the length of the cable changes with varying speeds. This has been addressed by a PID controller with feed forward augmentation and low-pass filters. Another challenging problem, synchronizing multiple servo motors, has been solved by designing an innovative decentralized algorithm. Extra attention was given to the safety aspects; a fail-safe, redundant safety system with interlocks has been developed, including protection for the operator and the superconducting cable against such situations as accidental over tension, or fast movement of the cable due to operational errors.
Proceedings of the North American Particle Accelerator Conf., NAPAC2016, Chicago, IL, USA