EPICS Based control system for cryogenic plant At VECC

Cryogenic Plant of Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre consists of two Helium refrigerators (250W and 415W @ 4.5K), valve box with sub-cooler and associated sub systems like pure gas storage, helium purifier and impure gas recovery etc. The system also consists of 3.1K liters of liquid Nitrogen (LN2) storage and delivery system. Many of the systems are procured from different suppliers and some are also developed in house. Due to the variety of systems and suppliers the control philosophy, communication protocols and component is also different. So the Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) module has to be such that it can take care of the variance and bring everything into a common control platform. To solve this purpose EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) architecture has been adopted. EPICS is having the advantage of being open source, flexible and unlimited as compared to the commercial SCADA packages.