Condition monitoring for a neutral beam injector cryopumping system

For neutral beam injection systems, the maintenance of a vacuum inside the injector box is essential for normal operation. Cryogenic pumping systems are often used to create and maintain this vacuum. Cryogenic pumping systems have been deployed on the neutral beam heating systems supporting the Joint European Torus. With these as a target application, the development of a condition monitoring scheme is presented. The scheme uses a residual generation approach. A bank of Kalman filters is used to estimate measured process variables. A residual evaluator is used to map residual signals onto a set of faults. Two example faults are simulated to demonstrate the response of the scheme. This paper contributes to the wider fusion development programme by demonstrating how a contemporary condition monitoring technique can be applied to a fusion support system, in order to improve its availability.