CRYRING@ESR - Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research

16 Chapter 5. CRYRING as Test Bench for FAIR
for following reasons:
• A new stack of control system solutions for FAIR can be implemented and tested without
ensuring full compatibility and coherency with the existing control system at any time
during development. Some of the new control system design principles for FAIR are
fundamentally different from the present GSI system (e.g. new beam and cycle concept,
replacement of the Virtual Accelerator concept by a more general and flexible one). With
CRYRING, these new solutions can be tested in an almost isolated environment in a system
comprising almost all kinds of accelerator systems (ion source, linear accelerator, beam
lines, synchrotron and storage ring) and without the constraints and having to reimplement
specific GSI functionality of the existing system (e.g. therapy mode, equipment status
concept, etc.).
• CRYRING as a stand-alone machine can provide more machine development time for control
system and equipment tests with much less organizational overhead than at UNILAC,
SIS, and ESR.
• The present GSI accelerator chain will experience a strongly reduced operation time in the
coming years (e.g. 3–4 months of operation per year only) and machine time for control
system tests will be quite limited. Machine operation times will be highly dedicated to
machine development (MD) activities as well as detector tests for FAIR. Since beam time
will be rare, a very stable and reliable control system is essential. This situation would be
in contradiction with the strategy to implement novel solutions and evaluate them during
longer runs. New solutions cannot provide the same level of robustness and availability
from the beginning on. It is to be expected that failures will occur. The opportunity of
dedicated MD runs at an independent ion beam facility will allow to solve and fix these
rollout problems with a minimal disruption of the precious beam time operation of the
GSI accelerators.
Practically, the strategy of the controls department would be as follows: Many of the control
system solutions needed for CRYRING modification are necessary for FAIR anyway. These are
presently already under development or will be developed in the course of the FAIR project.
These include front-end software equipment classes, generic operator applications, timing system,
setting generation software, etc. It is expected that these solutions can be adapted to
CRYRING with only moderate effort. As soon as these solutions are available, they can be
implemented in CRYRING for tests. First activities would be to implement the new control
system environment designed for FAIR in parallel to the CRYRING installation. This environment
will be the base for all control system components including those of the beam diagnostics
and available for component and integration tests.
Deeper understanding and more investigation of the present CRYRING control system is
needed to determine which subsystems can be replaced by corresponding FAIR developments.
The following list indicates some examples:
Equipment control for power converters with DC, pulsed and ramped operation. The
FAIR Standard Control Unit SCU with respective Front End Standard Architecture FESA
equipment class developments is the adequate solution. Controller prototypes and engineering
samples under development for FAIR can be used.
Timing system would be replaced by the facility-wide new General Machine Timing system.
Modifications to the timing system are needed anyway for beam transfer from ESR. Bunch
to bucket transfer can be implemented and studied for the bunch transfer from SIS18 to