A scalable and reconfigurable industrial-grade Slow Control System for SABRE-South Dark matter experiment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable, industrial-grade slow control system for the SABRE-South dark matter experiment, utilizing NI-cRIO and LabVIEW for flexible, cost-effective environmental monitoring.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, compact, and self-contained slow control system architecture that is scalable, cost-efficient, and capable of integrating custom software for dark matter experiments.

Findings

Design of a scalable control system based on NI-cRIO and LabVIEW.

System can implement functionalities similar to high-end SCADA systems.

Flexible integration of custom software like C++ and Python.

Abstract

The Sodium iodide Active Background Rejection Experiment-South (SABRE-South) is a direct dark matter detector soon to be deployed in the Stawell gold mine, in Victoria, Australia. Monitoring of external environmental and experimental conditions, (temperature, barometric pressure, relative humidity, high voltage, and seismic vibration) is vital to ensure the data quality of the SABRE search for dark matter via direct detection. These parameters are generally non-time-critical in the range of Hz to a few kHz and constitute a slow control system. We present the design of a novel compact, industrial-grade, and self-contained slow control system for SABRE-South. This system, featuring innovative hardware and software architecture based on National instruments compact RIO (NI-cRIO) and LabVIEW can be scaled up at low-cost and is capable of implementing the functionalities available in high-end SCADA systems while maintaining the flexibility to integrate custom software code (i.e. C++, PYTHON) for bespoke interfacing needs.