Speaker
Description
Within the frame of the Common Research Laboratory initiated in 2017 between French Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission (CEA) and Pau University (UPPA), FPGA based developments have been initiated in order to evaluate the potential benefits of such technology regarding the pulsed power applications domain.
Thus, some investigations are currently undergoing on the monitoring possibilities of electrical characteristics (and more specifically currents) in order to improve some maintenance and reliability aspects related to the operation of flash lamps used on high power lasers.
These very specific lamps need to be pre-ionized during a short period of time by a bi-exponential shaped current whose value has to be around 2kA before the true lamp ignition which is achieved through a 30kA pulsed current flow obtained by the discharge of a dedicated energy bench.
In order to try to reduce the number of inefficient ignitions, a control strategy based on the measurement of the pre-ionization phase is implemented. This strategy is based on Analog to Digital Conversion (ADC) as well as FPGA acquisition processing which was chosen due to its speed capabilities, and abilities to be stacked in order to perform multiple tasks in parallel. Our aim is to be able to acquire the signals rapidly and with sufficient accuracy, as well as to analyze them fast enough to make it possible to stop the ignition if necessary.
Since the environment where this system will be deployed can be considered as harsh due to the high transient currents levels being monitored and to the High Voltage switching elements operating near by, the choice of optical fibers insulation has been made.
This project made it possible to explore FPGA acquisition and control behavior under harsh perturbed environment. Recent developments regarding this implementation will be presented in details.
