Altator Project
Altator is a student designed and built toroidal plasma device here at the PSFC. It uses some extremely custom glass tube to form a vacuum sealed toroidal chamber, where a 13.56 MHz antenna is used to ionize the residual gasses in the chamber to form a plasma. Since 2016, the PSFC hasn't had many options to show real world world plasmas to people on tours and other outreach opportunities. Altator fixed that issue, and is now an exciting new hotbed for all kinds of fun upgrades in the future. Nearly all of the work was done by the graduate students preceding me, I just helped with getting the vacuum system all set up at the finish line. However, I am really excited to work on the complete control and safety system for Altator (in summer 2025). This is a work in progress, so stay tuned!
Making some final checks on some fittings. Here you can see the antenna wounds, covered in Kapton tape.
Me and Scott doing some testing of the roughing pump. Luckily, the O-Rings holding each quadrant of the torus are actually pretty robust. So we can get away with using just a simple roughing pump. Attached to the chamber is a Pirani gauge to measure the vacuum pressure.
Here is the work-in-progress Beckhoff PLC rail that I solely designed and built. It uses a CX5230 IPC, more than enough processing power for any future need. Breakers supply power from a 2A and a 4A DC power supply. In addition to the standard AI/O, DI/O IO, I decided to add RTD specific IO for the water-cooled magnet systems that we hope will eventually be installed. I also added TwinSAFE modules for implementation of an E-stop for the RF antenna system.
Currently, the PLC is only hooked up to the vacuum gauge. I added a small HMI in TwinCAT3 to visualize the change in chamber pressure over time. Cable routing is made easier with 3D printed cable clips.
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Right now there are not a lot of devices that are making use of this control system, but the hope is that future students will use this as a foundation to install plasma diagnostics, motorized systems, safety systems and much more. The sky is the limit when you have a robust, professional-grade control system that is as easily interactable as Beckhoff hardware.
Aren't plasmas pretty?