A full featured monitoring, control and data management system for liquid metal coolant loops

The heavy liquid metals (HLM) lead and lead-bismuth are considered as coolant and spallation material in accelerator driven systems (ADS) for nuclear waste transmutation. To investigate the viability of HLM cooled reactor systems the Karlsruhe Lead Laboratory (KALLA) was erected at the Institute for Nuclear and Energy Technologies (IKET) where three HLM loops are in operation to develop handling technology and to conduct thermohydraulic experiments. This paper outlines the requirements and describes the implementation of the software system designed to monitor and control these liquid metal loops. Developed in Lab VIEW, the modular distributed system integrates a heterogeneous hardware environment by means of standard communication protocols and provides data management based on ODBC connected databases. Thus, it is highly configurable and will be adapted for further experiments at the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, e.g. the spectrometer control of the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino mass experiment (KATRIN).