Radiation Tests on the Complete System of the Instrumentation of the LHC Cryogenics at the CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso (CNGS) Test Facility

There are more than 6000 electronic cards for the instrumentation of the LHC cryogenics, housed in crates and distributed around the 27 km tunnel. Cards and crates will be exposed to a complex radiation field during the 10 years of LHC operation. Rad-tol COTS and rad-hard ASIC have been selected and individually qualified during the design phase of the cards. The test setup and the acquired data presented in this paper target the qualitative assessment of the compliance with the LHC radiation environment of an assembled system. It is carried out at the CNGS test facility which provides exposure to LHC-like radiation field

First Experience with the LHC Cryogenic Instrumentation

The LHC under commissioning at CERN will be the world's largest superconducting accelerator and therefore makes extensive use of cryogenic instruments. These instruments are installed in the tunnel and therefore have to withstand the LHC environment that imposes radiation-tolerant design and construction. Most of the instruments require individual calibration; some of them exhibit several variants as concerns measuring span; all relevant data are therefore stored in an Oracle® database. Those data are used for the various quality assurance procedures defined for installation and commissioning, as well as for generating tables used by the control system to configure automatically the input/output channels. This paper describes the commissioning of the sensors and the corresponding electronics, the first measurement results during the cool-down of one machine sector; it discusses the different encountered problems and their corresponding solutions

The Radiation Tolerant Electronics for the LHC Cryogenic Controls: Basic Design and First Operational Experience

The LHC optics is based in the extensive use of superconducting magnets covering 23 km inside the tunnel. The associated cryogenic system for keeping the magnets in nominal conditions is hence distributed all around the 27 km LHC tunnel and the cryogenic instrumentation submitted to the LHC radiation environment is composed of about 18’000 sensors and actuators. Radiation Tolerant (RadTol) electronics was designed and procured in order to keep the signals integrity against electromagnetic interference and to reduce cabling costs required in case of sending the analog signals into the 30 radiation protected areas. This paper presents the basic design, the qualification of the main RadTol components and the first operational results

First experience with the lhc cryogenic instrumentation

The LHC under commissioning at CERN will be the world's largest superconducting accelerator and therefore makes extensive use of cryogenic instruments. These instruments are installed in the tunnel and therefore have to withstand the LHC environment that imposes radiation-tolerant design and construction. Most of the instruments require individual calibration; some of them exhibit several variants as concerns measuring span; all relevant data are therefore stored in an Oracle® database. Those data are used for the various quality assurance procedures defined for installation and commissioning, as well as for generating tables used by the control system to configure automatically the input/output channels. This paper describes the commissioning of the sensors and the corresponding electronics, the first measurement results during the cool-down of one machine sector; it discusses the different encountered problems and their corresponding solutions

Open Hardware For CERN's Accelerator Control Systems

The accelerator control systems at CERN will be renovated and many electronics modules will be redesigned as the modules they will replace cannot be bought anymore or use obsolete components. The modules used in the control systems are diverse: analog and digital I/O, level converters and repeaters, serial links and timing modules. Overall around 120 modules are supported that are used in systems such as beam instrumentation, cryogenics and power converters. Only a small percentage of the currently used modules are commercially available, while most of them had been specifically designed at CERN. The new developments are based on VITA and PCI-SIG standards such as FMC (FPGA Mezzanine Card), PCI Express and VME64x using transition modules. As system-on-chip interconnect, the public domain Wishbone specification is used. For the renovation, it is considered imperative to have for each board access to the full hardware design and its firmware so that problems could quickly be resolved by CERN engineers or its collaborators. To attract other partners, that are not necessarily part of the existing networks of particle physics, the new projects are developed in a fully ‘Open’ fashion. This allows for strong collaborations that will result in better and reusable designs. Within this Open Hardware project new ways of working with industry are being tested with the aim to prove that there is no contradiction between commercial off-the-shelf products and openness and that industry can be involved at all stages, from design to production and support

The LHC cryogenic operation for first collisions and physics run

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) cryogenic system was progressively and successfully run for the LHC accelerator operation period starting from autumn 2009. The paper recalls the cryogenic system architecture and main operation principles. The system stability during magnets powering and availability periods for high energy beams with first collisions at 3.5 TeV are presented. Treatment of typical problems, weak points of the system and foreseen future consolidations will be discussed

The commissioning of the instrumentation for the LHC tunnel cryogenics

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is a superconducting accelerator and proton-proton collider of circumference of 27 km, lying about 100 m underground. Its operation relies on 1232 superconducting dipoles with a field of 8.3 T and 392 superconducting quadrupoles with a field gradient of 223 T/m powered at 11.8 kA and operating in superfluid helium at 1.9 K. This paper describes the cryogenic instrumentation commissioning, the challenges and the project organization based on our 2.5 years experience

First assessment of reliability data for the LHC accelerator and detector cryogenic system components

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) cryogenic system comprises eight independent refrigeration and distribution systems that supply the eight 3.3 km long accelerator sectors with cryogenic refrigeration power as well as four refrigeration systems for the needs of the detectors ATLAS and CMS. In order to ensure the highest possible reliability of the installations, it is important to apply a reliability centred approach for the maintenance. Even though large scale cryogenic refrigeration exists since the mid 20th century, very little third party reliability data is available today. CERN has started to collect data with its computer aided maintenance management system (CAMMS) in 2009, when the accelerator has gone into normal operation. This paper presents the reliability observations from the operation and the maintenance side, as well as statistical data collected by the means of the CAMMS system