Development of a Data Acquisition Control System for the First NBI on EAST

Neutral beam injection (NBI) heating is one of the most efficient auxiliary plasma heating methods for fusion devices. The data acquisition control system (DACS) with PXI (peripheral component interconnect extensions for instrumentation) data acquisition card for the first NBI system in the experimental advanced superconducting tokamak (EAST) is presented in this paper. As an important sub-system, DACS is designed to obtain physical measurement signals in the EAST NBI system and to deal and store these data with the Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer (LZO) lossless data compression algorithm, as well as offer convenient data call-back and access interfaces to the user for examining and analyzing the data. Experimental results show that accurate data will ensure that researchers correctly analyze it and then properly adjust the experimental parameters or operation, so DACS should take a large step in improving experimental efficiency. The hardware and software sections are briefly presented in this paper, and now this system has been tested to be able to work reliably and steadily.