Activities brief

Activities of the CODAC Group

The CODAC group activities result from a collaborative effort between the various vertical engineering competencies on Instrumentation, applied to various fusion/physics areas.

Activities are mainly focused in:

• The specification, development and design of CODAC systems and components;
• The development of operation and algorithm codes for CODAC, diagnostics and plasma control systems;
• The specification of the control and data acquisition infrastructures for the upcoming ITER international fusion experiment;
• Collaboration on the development of international instrumentation standards;
• Establishment of International Strategic Partnerships with the Industry;
• Inform the Portuguese industry of fusion CODAC projects;
• Inbound and outbound education and training activities;
• Improving the laboratorial and work-shop infra-structures.

The main R&D outcome is measurement Instrumentation systems aiming at:

• Focused performance
• Reliability and availability
• Low-cost
• State-of-the-art componentes

Collaborations with Fusion Laboratories

Manpower and Resources

• The Group is composed of
5 PhD, 8 MSc, 2 Engineers and 2 Technicians .
•        4 of the Group members are in the process of graduation to PhD.
• Most of R&D work happens in-house.
• Only a fraction of the manpower is used for commissioning and R&D tasks on international experiments.
• In-house prototyping and testing.       

Collaboration with the industry

• Discussions have been held with international companies
  • Potential collaborations towards ITER
  • Licensing IPFN control & data acquisition systems
  • Co-development of control & data acquisition solutions
• IPFN is trying to improve the collaboration with national industry

Strategy

• Continue collaborations with ITER and other fusion experiments.
• Enlarge the scope of activities to other physics experiments, local or international.
• Establish definite paths for:
  • IP transfer to Industry
  • Outsourcing from Industry
• Improve efficiency of Project activities:
  • Continue R&D of a unified platform of Instrumentation able to cover a large scope of applications in Physics.
  • Establish clear boundaries between Academic activities and Project activities.
• Continue the development of critical components:
  • xTCA hardware, Real-time MARTe framework, EPICS machine control, High-speed codes and algorithms for FPGAs, High-performance networks for database access, real-time processing and synchronization.

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