A motion control system for fly scans synchronized to X-ray pulses

TUCG003
23 Sept 2025, 14:00
15m
Grand Ballroom (Palmer House Hilton Chicago)

Grand Ballroom

Palmer House Hilton Chicago

17 East Monroe Street Chicago, IL 60603, United States of America
Contributed Oral Presentation MC09: Experiment Control and Data Acquisition TUCG MC09 Experimental Control and Data Acquisition

Speaker

Nicholas Lentz (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

Description

With the High Energy Upgrade project in the installation phase at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), soon the repetition rate of the X-ray beam will exceed the capability of the present motion control system to reliably deliver samples. We describe the design of a motion control system which aims to deliver solid crystal samples within 5 um of the focal point of the X-ray beam at a rate of 1000 Hz using a fly scan. Throughout the fly scan, a triggered timestamping device is used with an EtherCAT based distributed clock to predict the position error at the time of each X-ray pulse. This position error is used in a feedback loop to bias the velocity command to each motion axis and restore synchronism. The design is flexible enough to expand to any number of synchronized axes up to the limits of the computing hardware. Additionally, with most of the software written in Structured Text language defined in IEC 61131-3, it is transferable to other EtherCAT based real-time systems with few modifications. Finally, we describe how the TwinCAT PLC programming environment can be used to develop and test almost all of the functionality of the software without hardware present, through a combination of unit testing and simulation axes.

Funding Agency

Basic Energy Science (BES)

Author

Nicholas Lentz (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

Co-authors

Barry Fishler (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) Usman Farooq (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) Zachary Lentz (Linac Coherent Light Source)

Presentation materials

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