Safety-Interlock System of the DSSC X-Ray Imager

TL;DR

This paper presents the design and implementation of a comprehensive safety-interlock system for the DSSC X-ray imager, integrating sensors and control logic to ensure safe operation and facilitate offline analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-sensor safety-interlock system with real-time monitoring and decision-making for the DSSC camera.

Findings

Effective monitoring of 75 temperature sensors and environmental signals.

Real-time safety decision-making and error flagging.

Successful hardware and software integration tested.

Abstract

In this paper, the DSSC safety-interlock system is introduced. It is designed to keep the DSSC mega-pixel camera in a safe-state. The system is composed of four inter-communicating sub-systems referred here as a master SIB (safety-interlock board) and three partner SIBs. Each SIB monitors and processes 75 temperature sensors mainly located in the focal plane and also distributed inside the camera-head electronics. It monitors the signals from two pressure sensors, one humidity sensor as well as the connectivity to sixteen low-voltage and two high-voltage cables. The master SIB supervises the signals to and from external equipments like the cooling system, pressure gauge, power crates and status information from experimental environment. SIB is an 8-layer printed-circuit board (PCB) with a micro-controller sitting on top as its central processing unit. A decision-matrix software reads the sensor status continuously and determines whether the camera is in a safe state or not. All error and warnings flags are sent to the detector control software framework and the end user directly. These flags are also stored every 100 ms together with the image data. The full SIB sensor data is sent to the back end for offline analysis. A shutdown sequence is initiated by SIB in case of a critical failure. The safety-interlock philosophy, hardware design, and software architecture along with test results will be presented.