Central Surveillance System for Functional Facilities of Radiochemistry Laboratory

Author

Abhishek Garg

Abstract

The objective of the project was to develop full featured, flexible, powerful and reliable centralized surveillance system to monitor and control functional facilities present in Radiochemistry Laboratory, IGCAR, just sitting in front of computer. Functional facilities like Gamma Area Monitors (to detect gamma rays), AC & Ventilation System (to maintain temperature & purify contaminated air) are present in RCL for healthy lab operation. A system had to be developed in which an application (developed in LabVIEW 8.0) would be running on Central Computer to acquire & display data from the above instruments implemented with Modbus Protocol. The instruments contained RS485 serial ports for communication. One instrument was connected to computer while others were connected in daisy chain form. In the core of LabVIEW application was to create drivers for instruments implemented with modbus protocol. Then making appropriate driver calls in other VIs to collect data from each instrument one by one in a loop as fast as possible and displaying the data in virtual panels created for all these instruments. Also features like storing data in files with date & time stamp for future reference, analysis of data with 3
comparison, web publishing of the application, automatic email, voice messages etc. were added.