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Accelerator reliability training help for experts

Jennifer Toes — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 14:58:07 +0000

Accelerator reliability training help for experts
by Panos Charitos

Attendees of the previous ARA course (Image: Athina Papageorgiou-Koufidou)

The goal of the four-day ARA training is to give a common foundation and identify the best practices in reliability engineering for CERN system experts. The biannual course is organized in collaboration with University of Stuttgart, Tampere University of Technology and Ramentor Oy.

Organizer Jussi-Pekka Penttinen describes importance of this type of course: "We all have some idea about reliability from our everyday life. One dictionary definition is that: a reliable vehicle, piece of equipment, or system always works well. Such vague definitions are not suitable in engineering projects. No system is totally free of failure and people working in large organizations have different backgrounds, and therefore their expectations for reliability vary. The training builds a common foundation and understanding of reliability terms and methods which are required to avoid misunderstandings."

The course will consist of three days of theoretical training and one hands on day with ELMAS software that is used in Future Circular Collider study. The topics to be covered include the mathematical treatment of reliability and availability, along with common reliability engineering methods, such as Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, Fault Trees and Reliability Block Diagrams.

The course also demonstrates that theoretical training does not need to be boring. In previous sessions, the participants were asked to bend paper clips. After a while the clip breaks due to metal fatigue. But all clips don’t break at the same time. The exercise demonstrates probabilistic nature of reliability as the number of cycles clips survive form a distribution.

Industry uses this same principle for accelerated life testing and so the exercise gives CERN experts an insight on how CERN suppliers might test their product reliability.

Previous participants have responded positively feedback to the thoroughness of the theory presented on the course, including their understanding of the ELMAS tool. Combining theory and hands-on elements are useful for fostering a deeper understanding of topics presented.

The original motivation for the course was born from the Future Circular Collider study, where the increasing size and stored energy of the collider can be a challenge for system designers.

High system reliability is the key to availability. In colliders, availability directly influences the number of collisions, which can have further knock-on effects on researcher’s ability to find adequate evidence of new physics, as well as reach statistical significance to confirm findings.

The ARA course ultimately aims to increase the number and experience of experts so they are ready to design reliable systems for future colliders.

The Autumn 2017 session of the Reliability Engineering Training will take place at CERN from Tuesday, November 14th to Friday, November 17th. The course is open to all CERN personnel, as well as collaboration partners with discretion.

For more information contact: FCC-RAMS@cern.ch

The author would like to thank Arto Niemi for his invaluable comments and fruitful feedback in writing this article.

Related reading:

Accelerator availability modeling / Integrated Luminosity: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevAccelBeams.19.121003
FCC Innovation Awards: https://fcc.web.cern.ch/Pages/news/FCC-Innovation-Awards.aspx
A scalable and open platform for complex system behavior assessment: https://indico.cern.ch/event/556692/contributions/2592536/

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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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Accelerator Reliability and Availability Training

Jennifer Toes — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 07:50:14 +0000

Accelerator Reliability and Availability Training
By Johannes Gutleber (CERN)

Participants of the Accelerator Reliability and Availability (ARA) training programme trial in March 2016 (Image: CERN)

Reliability and sustainability is a key issue for present and future accelerators. The Future Circular Collider (FCC) study launched a training programme on Accelerator Reliability and Availability (ARA) engineering at CERN. The goal is to build a common foundation in the field of reliability engineering for particle accelerators and to create an active network of accelerator engineers who can assess and address reliability topics. Within the next three years a community of about 150 accelerator experts will be trained in reliability engineering.

A trial session was organized end Februaruary 2016 at CERN, which was attended by more than 20 engineers currently involved in the operation of the LHC, the HL-LHC construction, as well as in the conceptual design study of a post-LHC circular collider.

The training establishes a common terminology and set of methods used by experts from different technical domains, ranging from mechanical engineering, electronics, and software to cryogenics, superconductivity, vacuum, radiofrequency, and power engineering. The course conveys the mathematical foundations of reliability analysis and creates a sensibility to the importance of gathering field data and controlling the data quality as the pre-requisite for any reliability engineering activity. Over the coming six months, the course organisers will further develop the practical examples from the particle accelerator domain ranging from modelling vacuum systems, cryogenics supply, machine protection to beam production. This will allow the participants to profit from the methods and tools taught in their everyday operation and design work. The organizers also put special focus on equal opportunities which was already reflected in the attendance of the trial session with an outstanding 25% of female participation. The training is provided by University of Stuttgart, Tampere University of Technology and spin-off company Ramentor.

The “Foundations in Accelerator Reliability and Availability Engineering” course will start in autumn 2016 and it will run twice a year until 2018. The course will be free of charge for personnel involved in the conceptualisation and design of future circular colliders at CERN.

Read more about the training programme here.

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