Development and implementation of flowing liquid lithium limiter control system for EAST

A control system of a flowing liquid lithium (FLiLi) limiter for the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) was developed and implemented. The control system is not only able to control the direct current (DC) electromagnetic pump and heating power but can also set scanning parameters, receive the shot number, acquire the temperature, etc. The system consists of multifunctional LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation (LXI) instrument, temperature-acquisition module, programmable DC power supply, and programmable logic controller (PLC). The multi-range DC power supply is programmed to meet the operational requirements of the DC electromagnetic pump. The LXI instrument and temperature-acquisition module are used to obtain temperature data. The PLC is adopted to control the temperature of the FLiLi limiter. A safety interlock and protection function was developed for the FLiLi limiter control system. The software was designed by using LabVIEW to achieve data interaction between multiple protocols. The FLiLi limiter control system can acquire experimental data at a speed of 100 S/s and store it for later analysis. The control system was successfully applied to a FLiLi limiter to study the interaction between plasma and a fixed wall in the EAST campaign. This paper presents the framework, the implementation details, and results of the control system.