A real-time, distributed power measuring and transient recording system for accelerators' electrical networks

Particle accelerators are complex machines with fast and high power absorption peaks. Power quality is a critical aspect for correct operation. External and internal disturbances can have significant repercussions causing beam losses or severe perturbations. Mastering the load and understanding how network disturbances propagate across the network is a crucial step for developing the grid model and realizing the limits of the existing installations. Despite the fact that several off-the-shelf solutions for real time data acquisition are available, an in-house FPGA based solution was developed to create a distributed measurement system. The system can measure power and power quality on demand as well as acquire raw current and voltage data on a defined trigger, similar to a distributed oscilloscope. In addition, the system allows recording many digital signals from the high voltage switchgear enabling electrical perturbations to be easily correlated with the state of the network. The result is a scalable system with fully customizable software, written specifically for this purpose. The system prototype has been in service for two years and full-scale deployment is currently ongoing.