ITER approves the design of the Central Safety System for Occupational Safety (CSS-OS) prepared by Procon Systems

In April, Procon Systems presented and defended the final design of the Central Safety System for Occupational Safety to a dedicated panel of experts from ITER and CERN, who validated the design before initiating the manufacturing phase. The participating experts from different fields (maintenance, infrastructure, interfaces, safety, …) provided excellent feedback which resulted in a green light to start the manufacturing by end of May.

ITER (“the way”) is an international collaborative project to build the largest nuclear fusion machine ever built and the first designed to deliver a factor of 10 more output than input power. The reactor will be constructed from a large number of components or “plant systems” which will be delivered complete or in parts by the participating countries as “in kind” contributions, in compliance with contractual agreements with the ITER Organization.

The individual plant systems are themselves, in many cases, large and complex facilities. They include the largest vacuum vessel ever built for plasma confinement, enormous superconducting magnet coils and their associated power supplies, one of the world’s largest cryogenic plants to provide coolants for these coils, conventional (but large) vacuum and water-cooling systems, radio-frequency systems for electron and ion heating, a small accelerator to produce a neutral beam also for heating and an array of sophisticated diagnostic equipment to monitor the plasma. Each of these subsystems will be delivered with its own control system (“Plant System I&Cs”).

The CSS-OS is in charge of implementing OS I&C functions via the Central Safety Network for Occupational Safety (CSN-OS) and together with the different Plant Safety Systems for Occupational Safety (PSS-OS), sensors and actuators. The CSS-OS is a central coordinator that receives OS events from the different PSS-OS and dispatches commands to the same or other PSS-OS at the required performance and integrity levels. The CSS-OS executes manual commands from the Safety Operator’s Desk. The CSS-OS makes the occupational safety information treated at the PSS-OS level available at both control rooms. It also provides to the plant system experts and operators the software tools for interfacing with the different PSS-OS.

Technically, the system is very challenging because of the Safety requirements and the system needs for flexibility and scalability, as new plants will need to be integrated in the future.

Procon Systems has developed the detailed design of the system in the boundaries of the technologies involved such as redundant Siemens safety PLCs, hardware design using SEE Electrical Expert, SCADA using WinCC OA and Monitoring Systems based on Linux. The design has been done in compliance with IEC 61511: “Functional safety - Safety instrumented systems for the process industry sector".