Cosylab_Fusion and the industry_featured

Fusion and the Industry: Today and Tomorrow

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One of the longest-standing jokes in experimental physics has been that affordable fusion energy is just around the corner – with the punchline that the corner lies twenty-five years in the future. States and international consortiums of countries have been investing large sums of money in prominent scientific fusion projects for years. Among these are the British Joint European Torus (JET), South Korea's KSTAR reactor, the international ITER fusion project, Germany's Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator, and China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST).
EPICS framework

EPICS is an Accelerator for Mission-Critical Control Systems

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Advancements in industrial automation and computing have allowed the widespread use of control system components and frameworks and the adoption of good practices and solutions from research institutions and the industry alike. What was previously cutting-edge in scientific engineering has, in the last years, crossed over into the industrial mainstream of accelerator applications and fusion powerplant prototypes, fuelling an increase in activity.

How to Build the Perfect Fusion Plant: A Technical Architect’s Perspective

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Fusion promises to free humankind from the woes of limited and expensive energy production. The route to practical and affordable fusion powerplants has been long and twisty. Probably the shortest route – iter in Latin – to the scientific validation of the fusion concept will be the ITER project in France, arguably the global outlier in the scientific development of fusion technology. When ITER achieves its goal of sustaining a human-made artificial star in its toroidal magnetic field, the end of using uranium or plutonium fuel rods in fission reactors and consuming fossil fuel in coal-burning powerplants will be in sight.
Cosylab_ ITER Simulation Platform

The ITER Simulation Platform Project is a Success!

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Fusion power plants take a long time to be designed and built, and the experimental tokamak of ITER is no exception. The latter will be the world’s first nuclear fusion power plant to maintain long-duration fusion while producing net energy.
Cosylab_EPICS-ADS

A Fast Integration of PLCs and EPICS

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Programmable logic controllers (PLCs) have been widely used in industrial control systems for many years now, such as aviation, automotive, processing, production assembly-line, manufacturing, energy and oil-processing industry. Engineers find PLCs simple to program and capable of controlling a multitude of automatic processes. PLCs contain microcontroller units (MCUs) whose capabilities have increased steadily with time, making PLCs much more capable than a decade ago and ready to tackle new challenges in system automation.

A Checklist for a Modern Control System

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In the last decade, control system development for Big Science facilities has become an established engineering discipline and less of a scientific endeavour that it expectedly was, at times, characterised by the "not-invented-here" viewpoint.
How to perform a Control Systems Project: The Example of BBCS

How to Perform a Control Systems Project: The Example of BBCS

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As early as 2012, the consulting firm McKinsey&Co determined that "half of all large IT projects massively overblow their budget". This finding, consistent across industries, also threatens big science projects in general, and their control-system integration programmes specifically. Our company has been an external contributor to integrating control systems for large scientific installations and sites worldwide for almost twenty years. I am going to describe what methodology we usually use as the most effective in control-system projects.