The New Acquisition System of the High Voltage Padova Test Facility

Voltage holding in vacuum is one of the most critical issues for the experiment MITICA (Megavolt ITer Injector & Concept Advancement), aimed at realizing the 40 A - 1 MegaVolt prototype of the ITER HNB at the Consorzio RFX in Padova. For this reason, boosting the R&D on this specific problem has been identified as a priority to attain the success of the MITICA experiment, by means of the realization of the dedicated Laboratory HVPTF - High Voltage Padova Test Facility. This Laboratory is capable to carry experiments up to 800 kV, and recently has been equipped with a new data acquisition system. The improvement of this system, formerly based on optical RS232 data transmission, resulted necessary in order to better investigate the transient phenomena (bursts) related to the voltage conditioning. It acquires from the probes Current, X ray dose and Pressure, whose analysis helps in the understanding of the mechanism of the production of such bursts. The system is presently capable to acquire up to 8 analogue measurements sampled up to 10kHz. To minimize conducted EMI, the system is fully insulated to ground, with the electronic cards fed by a battery Power Supply. The environment is LabView v.13 for the data acquisition, while for data visualization and post processing analyses, the MDS-PLUS v.7.0-42 tool has been employed.