accelerating-news-arc.web.cern.ch - LHC

QUACO enters into Phase 2

Jennifer Toes — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 14:33:14 +0000

QUACO enters into Phase 2
by Isabel Bejar Alonso (CERN)

QUACO is a Pre Commercial Procurement (PCP) Project (Grant Agreement 689359) with key scope to procure two pilot 3.8 m quadrupole magnets with 90 mm apertures, an integrated gradient of 440 T with 120 T/m in the transverse plane and finally with an operational temperature of 1.9 K.

On 29 September last year, four companies (Antec, Elytt, Sigmaphi and Tesla) obtained a work order for Phase 1. The main milestone of this phase included:

Conceptual Design Report of the magnet covering the results obtained in Phase 1;
Preliminary 2D and 3D CAD model of the magnet;
Conceptual Design Report of the Tooling including Coil fabrication tooling conceptual design and Magnet assembly tooling conceptual design;
Development and Manufacturing plan including detailed plan for phase 2 engineering design.

Evaluators from CEA, CERN, CIEMAT and NCBJ assessed the work produced and all four tenders satisfactorily completed Phase 1.

Each one of the four contractors explored a different conceptual solution demonstrating the strength of the PCP as a method to develop innovative solutions. The summary of the results can be found on the QUACO project website.

On 12 May 2017 the successful tenderers were invited to submit their offers for Phase 2. After the evaluation of the technical and financial offers three tenderers were awarded on 30th June with a contract to execute Phase 2 of the PCP (Antec, Elytt and Sigmaphi). The main milestone of this phase included

Detailed Magnetic and Mechanic design optimisation
Sensitivity analysis toward fabrication
Detailed 2D and 3D CAD manufacturing drawings of the magnet and subcomponents including instrumentation schematics
Detailed 2D and 3D CAD drawings of the manufacturing tooling
Manufacturing and Inspection Plan (MIP)
Mock-ups

This phase is the engineering phase with the first mock-ups and with the complete technical solutions. The three companies have thirteen months ahead of them to demonstrate their capacity to build the future MQYY prototype. The PCP is a competitive procedure and only two of them will receive a work order for phase 3.

Pre-commercial procurement is a unique and novel procurement method in the field of accelerator components, and QUACO aims to demonstrate its full potential for success in this field.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 PCP programme under Grant Agreement no. 689359

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issue 21

Laser technology take the LHC to the next level

Livia Lapadatescu — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 16:05:54 +0000

Laser technology to help take the LHC to the next level
by Panos Charitos (CERN)

Jointly developed by researchers from the University of Dundee and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the technology – which is known as LESS (Laser Engineered Surface Structures) – could increase the range of experiments possible on the LHC by helping to clear the so-called “electron cloud”: a cloud of negative particles which can degrade the performance of the primary proton beams that circulate in the accelerator.

Laser-engineered surface structures (Image credit: STFC Daresbury Laboratory)

Removing this electron cloud will expand the range of experiments that the LHC, the world’s largest particle collider, can carry out. Professor Amin Abdolvand, chair of functional materials and photonics at Dundee University said: “Large particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider suffer from a fundamental limitation known as the ‘electron cloud’.

“This cloud of negative particles under certain conditions may degrade the performance of the primary proton beams that circulate in the accelerator, which is central to its core experiments.

“Current efforts to limit these effects involve applying composite metal or amorphous carbon coatings to the inner surfaces of the LHC vacuum chambers. These are expensive and time consuming processes that are implemented under vacuum.”

Tests have shown that it is possible to reformulate the surface of the metals in the LHC vacuum chambers to a design that under a microscope resembles the type of sound padding seen in music studios. The surface can trap electrons, keeping the chambers clear of the cloud.

The image shows the metal before the laser treatment (top) and afterwards (bottom) where one can see the characteristic pattern that resembles the type of sound padding (Image credit: Dundee University)

Future upgrades of the LHC that will double the intensity of the beams – thus resulting in a denser electron cloud – and studies for future circular high-intensity and high-energy colliders, could profit from this technique. The LESS method, which uses lasers to manipulate the surface of metals, could effectively reduce the electron cloud allowing for more powerful beams.

Professor Lucio Rossi, project leader of the High Luminosity LHC, said: “If successful, this method will allow us to remove fundamental limitations of the LHC and reach the parameters which are needed for the high luminosity upgrade in an easier and less expensive way. “This will boost the experimental program by increasing the number of collisions in the LHC by a factor over the present machine configuration.”

Michael Benedikt, head of the Future Circular Collider Study at CERN, said: “The LESS solution could be easily integrated in the design of future high-intensity proton accelerators; the method is scalable from small samples to kilometre-long beam lines.”

(*Front page image credit: Joshua Valcarel)

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Civil engineering for the High-Luminosity LHC

Livia Lapadatescu — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 08:39:10 +0000

Civil engineering for the High-Luminosity LHC
by Jean Laurent Tavian (CERN), Peter Mattelaer (CERN)

The High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) project at CERN will require large infrastructures and services for the powering and the cooling of the high-field superconducting quadrupole magnets constituting the new inner triplets and of the superconducting RF crab-cavities used for the luminosity levelling. These new LHC accelerator components will be integrated at Point 1 and Point 5 of the LHC accelerator where the two large LHC detectors ATLAS and CMS are located (see Figure 1). These new infrastructures and services consist mainly of power transmission, electrical distribution, cooling, ventilation, cryogenics, power converters for superconducting magnets and inductive output tubes for superconducting RF cavities. To house all these new infrastructures and services, civil engineering structures are required including buildings, shaft, caverns and underground galleries.

Figure 1. Underground civil engineering of LHC (Image credit: CERN)

At ground level, the civil engineering consists of five buildings, technical galleries, access roads, concrete slabs and landscaping (See Figures 2 and 3). Per Point, the total surface corresponds to about 20’000 m², including 3’300 m² of buildings. A cluster of three buildings is located at the head of the shaft and will house the helium refrigerator cold-box (SD building), the water-cooling and ventilation units (SU building) as well as the main electrical distribution for high and low voltage (SE building). Two stand-alone buildings complete the inventory and will house the primary-water cooling towers (SF building) and the warm compressor station of the helium refrigerator (SHM building). Buildings housing noisy equipment (SU, SF, SHM) are built with noise-insulated concrete walls and roofs.

Figure 2. Point 1 ground-level civil engineering work (Image credit: CERN)

Figure 3. Point 5 ground-level civil engineering work (Image credit: CERN)

At underground level, the civil engineering work consist of a shaft, a service cavern, galleries, and vertical cores (See Figure 4). The total volume to be excavated corresponds to about 40’000 m³ per Point. The PM shaft (9.7-m diameter, 80-m height) will house a secured access lift and staircase as well as the services required at underground level. The service cavern (US/UW, 16-m diameter, 45-m long) will house cooling and ventilation units, a cryogenic box, an electrical safe room and electrical transformers. The UR gallery (5.8-m diameter, 300-m long) will house the power converters and electrical feed boxes for the superconducting magnets as well as cryogenic and service distribution. Two transversal UA galleries (6.2-m diameter, 50-m long) will house the RF equipment for the powering and controls of the superconducting crab-cavities. At the end of the UA galleries, evacuation galleries (UPR) are required for personnel emergency exits. Two transversal UL galleries (3-m diameter, 40-m long) will house the superconducting links powering the magnets and cryogenic distribution. Finally, the connection of the HL-LHC underground galleries to the LHC tunnel is made via 16 vertical cores (1-m diameter, 7-m long).

Figure 4. Underground civil-engineering work (Courtesy of LAP consortium)

The definition of the civil engineering for the HL-LHC has started in 2015. First integration studies have been performed in collaboration with the CERN SMB (Site Management and Buildings) Department, the equipment groups and the HL-LHC Project Office. In 2016, the completion of a preliminary study has allowed to issue a call for tender for two civil-engineering consultant contracts, which have been adjudicated in June 2016. These consultants are in charge of the preliminary, tender and construction design of the civil engineering works, as well as of the management of the construction including the defect liability. At Point 1 on the Swiss side, the consultant contract was adjudicated to a consortium, called ORIGIN, constituted of 3 companies: SETEC (FR) the consortium leader, CDS Engineers (CH) and Rocksoil (IT). At Point 5 on the French side, the consultant contract was adjudicated to a consortium, called LAP, constituted of 3 companies: Lombardi (CH) the consortium leader, Artelia (FR) and Pini Swiss (CH). In November 2016, the two consultants have completed the preliminary design phase including cost and construction-schedule estimates for the civil engineering work execution.

In parallel with the preliminary design, CERN, with the help of architects, has prepared the building permit applications which have been submitted to the Swiss and French Authorities in October and November 2016. Between 6 to 9 months will be required to get the building permit authorization, that is compatible with the start of the construction works scheduled by mid-2018. CERN has also performed geotechnical investigation in order to better identify the soil constituents. CERN has placed a contract with an independent engineer (Joint venture of ARUP (UK) and Geoconsult (AT)). This independent engineer will perform peer reviews of the consultant designs and will confirm that these designs have been performed with the appropriate skill, care and diligence in accordance with applicable standards. In addition, an adjudicator panel is constituted with lawyers, architects and civil engineers to resolve disputes in-between all parties.

The next important milestone will be the adjudication in March 2018 of the two contracts (one per Point) for the civil-engineering construction works. The tendering process has started with the issue of a market survey in December 2016 including relevant selection criteria requirements. It will be followed by calls for tenders, which will be sent to the qualified companies by June 2017. The main excavation works, producing harmful vibrations for the LHC accelerator performance, must be performed during the second long-shutdown of the LHC accelerator scheduled in 2019-2020. The completion of the civil-engineering with the hand-over of the last building is scheduled by end-2022. The vertical cores connecting the HL-LHC galleries to the LHC tunnel will be burrowed during the first semester of the third long-shutdown of the LHC accelerator, which is expected to start beginning of 2024.

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Accelerator Fault Tracking at CERN

Panagiotis Charitos — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 13:41:15 +0000

Accelerator Fault Tracking at CERN
by Chris Roderick (CERN)

During Run 2 the LHC achieved an outstanding performance (Image: CERN CDS)

CERN’s Accelerator Fault Tracking (AFT) system aims to facilitate answering questions like: “Why are we not doing Physics when we should be?” and “What can we do to increase machine availability?”

People have tracked faults for many years, using numerous diverse, distributed and un-related systems. As a result, and despite a lot of effort, it has been difficult to get a clear and consistent overview of what is going on, where the problems are, how long they last for, and what is the impact. This is particularly true for the LHC, where faults may induce long recovery times after being fixed.

The AFT project was launched in February 2014 as collaboration between the Controls and Operations groups with stakeholders from the LHC Availability Working Group (AWG).

The project was initially divided into 3 phases, with the 1st phase completed on time, ahead of the LHC restart (post Long Shutdown 1: 2013-2014) and delivering the means to achieve consistent and coherent data capture for LHC, from an operational perspective. Phase 2 of the project has been in progress during 2015-16 working on detailed fault classification and analysis for equipment groups. Phase 3 (pending) foresees extended integration with other systems e.g. asset management tracking to be able to make predictive failure analysis and plan preventive maintenance operations.

AFT helps various teams from around CERN, and output from the Web application regularly features in various machine coordination and operations meetings. Furthermore the AWG and various equipment group representatives are using AFT data and statistics to analyse the performance of their systems and target areas for improvement – as presented at various conferences and workshops [1] [2], and summarized in regular AWG reports [3] [4] [5].

If a picture is worth a 1000 words, then take a look at the AFT Cardiogram (Figure 1) that displays LHC faults occurring in 2016 between Technical Stops 1 and 2, together with the machine activity data.

Figure 1 LHC Faults between 2016 Technical Stops 1 and 2

AFT allows representing relationships between faults such as child faults (represented in pink on the Cardiogram) and faults blocking the resolution of another fault. With such data it is possible to analyse availability from different perspectives such as raw system downtime, impact on machine availability (accounting for faults occurring in the shadow of on-going faults) and root cause analysis (assigning child fault downtime to parent faults). Figure 2 shows an example of such a comparison, for a specific sub-domain of systems displayed in the AFT Web application.

Figure 2 Comparison of Fault Time from different perspectives for LHC Technical Services

Other functionality includes: fault searching and data export with a workflow for fault follow-up by different experts. Like most data-centric systems, the value of the infrastructure and tools is always governed by the quality of the data, and so the role of the AWG – who regularly meet to ensure the completeness and correctness of the AFT data – shouldn’t be underestimated.

The technologies involved are a database to persist fault data, a Java server with ReST APIs for data exchange with the Operation team’s E-logbooks (and potentially other systems), and a dedicated Web application for data editing / visualization and analysis (shown in above screenshots).

The AFT system has been designed to be non-LHC specific, and therefore is able to cater for fault tracking for other accelerators if so desired. Due to the success of AFT for LHC during 2015, in 2016 the CERN Machine Advisory Committee proposed that AFT be used for CERN’s Injector Complex. As such, work has started in late 2016 to prepare for AFT usage in the Injector Complex from the start of 2017 operation at the end of March.

References

[1] 7th Evian Workshop, 2016, https://indico.cern.ch/event/578001

[2] LHC Performance Workshop (Chamonix 2017), https://indico.cern.ch/event/580313/

[3] LHC Availability 2016: Restart to Technical Stop 1, CERN-ACC-NOTE-2016-0047, http://cds.cern.ch/record/2195706?ln=en

[4] LHC Availability 2016: Technical Stop 1 to Technical Stop 2, CERN-ACC-NOTE-2016-0066, http://cds.cern.ch/record/2235082?ln=en

[5] LHC Availability 2016: Technical Stop 2 to Technical Stop 3, CERN-ACC-NOTE-2016-0065, http://cds.cern.ch/record/2235079?ln=en

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Circulating ideas about a new Higgs factory

Margarita Synanidi — Thu, 27 Nov 2014 09:26:56 +0000

Circulating ideas about a new Higgs factory

Sketch of LEP3/TLEP double ring: a first ring accelerates electrons and positrons up to operating energy 45-120 (180) GeV and injects them at a few minutes interval into the low-emittance collider ring, which includes high luminosity interaction points (A. Blondel/U. Geneva)

Could the LHC tunnel one day house a high-luminosity electron-positron collider? This idea joined others at the LEP3 Day, held at CERN on 18 June 2012.

In 2011, early LHC indications suggested that the Higgs boson might be light, with a mass in the range 115-130 GeV. On Christmas’ Eve 2011 the first concrete proposal for a high-luminosity circular electron-positron collider was presented after Alain Blondel of Geneva University realised that an object like this could be studied in the LHC tunnel at about 240-GeV centre-of-mass energy.

This, along with the numerous encouraging reactions to this proposal, led the EuCARD Work Package 4 “AccNet” to organise a “LEP3 Day”, which was only a few weeks before the LHC’s ATLAS and CMS experiments announced the discovery of a Higgs-like boson with a mass of 125 GeV. About 40 motivated accelerator physicists from Switzerland, Japan, Russia, US and the UK participated in this EuCARD LEP3 Day, including Steve Myers, CERN Director of Accelerators and Technology, the KEK trustee Yasuhiro Okada, and members of CMS and ATLAS. A full report on the LEP3 Day is now available.

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LHC - Higgs factory

Margarita Synanidi — Thu, 27 Nov 2014 09:05:58 +0000

LHC - Higgs factory
by Mike Lamont (CERN)

Fig1: Joe Incandela, CMS Spokesperson presenting at Higgs search update on 4 July 2012. (click to enlarge) Image credit: CERN
Fig2: Improvements in LHC performance are clear - this graph shows the luminosity delivered to the Atlas experiment in 2010 (green), 2011 (red) and 2012 (blue) for proton-proton collisions. Image credit: CERN

With a wry smile, Fabiola Gianotti showed the significance of the combined gamma-gamma and 4 lepton channels. "We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV." She gave heartfelt thanks to "the whole LHC exploitation team, including the operation, technical and infrastructure groups, for the outstanding performance of the machine, and to all the people who have contributed to the conception, design, construction and operation of this superb instrument".

It hasn't been easy. First beams were injected on the 10th September 2008. 9 days later - disaster, and it was November 2009 before beams were injected again following a Herculean effort to repair the seriously damaged sector 34. The causes of the incident were examined closely and caution dictated running at less than design energy: 3.5 TeV in 2010 and 2011; 4 TeV in 2012.

2010 was devoted to commissioning with beam with a very careful eye on the critical machine protection system. Towards the end of the year luminosity production really started. The total for 2010: around 50 inverse picobarns. The total by the 4th July 2012: around 10,000 inverse picobarns.

The machine has a limited number of parameters it can use to increase the collision rates seen by the experiments: number of bunches; number of protons per bunch; and the beam size at the interaction point. Over the last couple of years the LHC and its injectors have pushed hard on all options with considerable reward. Squeezing the beam sizes down to around 70 microns at the interaction points in ATLAS and CMS, coupled with small beam sizes and high bunch intensities from the injector chain have resulted in truly impressive collision rates. This performance, together with good machine availability, has allowed the LHC to deliver something like 800 trillion collisions to each of ATLAS and CMS. A very few of these have produced something that looks like a Higgs.

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