COLLECTIVE CATERING AND MICROBIOLOGICAL CONTROL: RESULT OF SURVEYINGS AT COOKING CENTRES DURING YEAR 2010

In this article was made up statistics on food samples collected in 2010 at cooking centers and analyzed for the presence of pathogenic or non-patogenic microorganisms. The results shows that most of the samples respects the limits imposed by reg. 2073/2005, due to the good manufacturing practices and application of HACCP

Thermostructural characterization and structural elastic property optimization of novel high luminosity LHC collimation materials at CERN

The CERN Large Hadron Collider is currently being upgraded to operate at a stored beam energy of 680 MJ through the High Luminosity upgrade. The LHC performance is dependent on the functionality of beam collimation systems, essential for safe beam cleaning and machine protection. A dedicated beam experiment at the CERN High Radiation to Materials facility is created under the HRMT-23 experimental campaign. This experiment investigates the behavior of three collimation jaws having novel composite absorbers made of copper diamond, molybdenum carbide graphite, and carbon fiber carbon, experiencing accidental scenarios involving the direct beam impact on the material. Material characterization is imperative for the design, execution, and analysis of such experiments. This paper presents new data and analysis of the thermostructural characteristics of some of the absorber materials commissioned within CERN facilities. In turn, characterized elastic properties are optimized through the development and implementation of a mixed numerical-experimental optimization technique.peer-reviewe

Design, construction, and beam tests of a rotatable collimator prototype for high-intensity and high-energy hadron accelerators

A rotatable-jaw collimator design was conceived as a solution to recover from catastrophic beam impacts which would damage a collimator at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) or its High-Luminosity upgrade (HL-LHC). One such rotatable collimator prototype was designed and built at SLAC and delivered to CERN for tests with LHC-type circulating beams in the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). This was followed by destructive tests at the dedicated High Radiation to Materials (HiRadMat) facility to validate the design and rotation functionality. An overview of the collimator design, together with results from tests without and with beam are presented

Modeling of beam-induced damage of the LHC tertiary collimators

Modern hadron machines with high beam intensity may suffer from material damage in the case of large beam losses and even beam-intercepting devices, such as collimators, can be harmed. A systematic method to evaluate thresholds of damage owing to the impact of high energy particles is therefore crucial for safe operation and for predicting possible limitations in the overall machine performance. For this, a three-step simulation approach is presented, based on tracking simulations followed by calculations of energy deposited in the impacted material and hydrodynamic simulations to predict the thermomechanical effect of the impact. This approach is applied to metallic collimators at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which in standard operation intercept halo protons, but risk to be damaged in the case of extraction kicker malfunction. In particular, tertiary collimators protect the aperture bottlenecks, their settings constrain the reach in β^{*} and hence the achievable luminosity at the LHC experiments. Our calculated damage levels provide a very important input on how close to the beam these collimators can be operated without risk of damage. The results of this approach have been used already to push further the performance of the present machine. The risk of damage is even higher in the upgraded high-luminosity LHC with higher beam intensity, for which we quantify existing margins before equipment damage for the proposed baseline settings

Construction and bench testing of a prototype rotatable collimator for the LHC

A second generation prototype rotatable collimator has been fabricated at SLAC and delivered to CERN for further vacuum, metrology, function and impedance tests. The design features two cylindrical Glidcop jaws designed to each absorb 12 kW of beam in steady state and up to 60 kW in transitory beam loss with no damage and minimal thermal distortion [1]. The design is motivated by the use of a radiation resistant high Z low impedance readily available material. A vacuum rotation mechanism using the standard LHC collimation jaw positioning motor system allows each jaw to be rotated to present a new 2 cm high surface to the beam if the jaw surface were to be damaged by multiple full intensity beam bunch impacts in a asynchronous beam abort. Design modifications to improve on the first generation prototype, pre-delivery functional tests performed at SLAC and post-delivery test results at CERN are presented.ALBA-CELLS,American Physical Society Division of Physics of Beams (APS-DPB),Asian Committee for Future Accelerators (ACFA),ASTeC/STFC,Centro Fermi,et al.peer-reviewe

Survival in amoeba: a major selection pressure on the presence of bacterial copper and zinc resistance determinants?: identification of a "copper pathogenicity island"

The presence of metal resistance determinants in bacteria usually is attributed to geological or anthropogenic metal contamination in different environments or associated with the use of antimicrobial metals in human healthcare or in agriculture. While this is certainly true, we hypothesize that protozoan predation and macrophage killing are also responsible for selection of copper/zinc resistance genes in bacteria. In this review, we outline evidence supporting this hypothesis, as well as highlight the correlation between metal resistance and pathogenicity in bacteria. In addition, we introduce and characterize the "copper pathogenicity island" identified in Escherichia coli and Salmonella strains isolated from copper- and zinc-fed Danish pigs