A High Performance Control System for a Heavy Ion Medical Accelerator

A high performance control system is being designed as part of a heavy ion medical accelerator. The accelerator will be a synchrotron dedicated to clinical and other biomedical uses of heavy ions, and it will deliver fully stripped ions at energies up to 800 MeV/nucleon. A key element in the design of an accelerator which will operate in a hospital environment is to provide a high performance control system. This control system will provide accelerator modeling to facilitate changes in operating mode, provide automatic beam tuning to simplify accelerator operations, and provide diagnostics to enhance reliability. The control system being designed utilizes many microcomputers operating in parallel to collect and transmit data; complex numerical computations are performed by a powerful minicomputer. In order to provide the maximum operational flexibility, the Medical Accelerator control system will be capable of dealing with pulse-to-pulse changes in beam energy and ion species.