INTEGRATION AND FIRST OPERATION OF THE RFX CONTROL AND DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEM

The RFX plant is functionally organized in local units and subsystems. The Control and Data Acquisition System (“SIGMA”) reflects this structure. It uses programmable controllers (PLCs) for slow signals and VAX based CAMAC for the fast data acquisition and timing tasks. The commissioning of SIGMA took about four months and followed the functional structure of the plant: independent commissioning of local units, subsystem-wide integration, system-wide integration. SIGMA was completely operational at the end of the power supply integration phase of RFX (June 1991). The integrated machine commissioning and first operation phases of RFX were indistinguishable for SIGMA. RFX produced first plasma in November 1991 under fully remote computer control. The paper gives a short description of the procedures and discusses the features of SIGMA which contributed to this fast and smooth commissioning.