Automatic high voltage conditioning of the electrostatic LEP separators without conventional programming

The TS Tool Kit is a generic, fully data-driven, and user-configurable software system developed at CERN for supervisory, control, and data acquisition applications. It provides a comprehensive framework to solve fairly complex process control problems requiring response times of the order of a second, without any need for conventional programming. The characteristics and benefits of this approach are discussed at the example of the new high voltage conditioning process for the electrostatic LEP separators

Control Loop for a Pulse Generator of a Fast Septum Magnet using DSP and Fuzzy Logic

A prototype of a fast pulsed eddy current septum magnet for one of thebeam extraction's from the SPS towards LHC is under development. The precision of the magnetic field must be better than ±1.0 10-4 during a flat top of 30 µs. The current pulse is generated by discharging the capacitors of a LC circuit that resonates on the 1st and on the 3rd harmonic of a sine wave with a repetition rate of 15 s. The parameters of the circuit and the voltage on the capacitors must be carefully adjusted to meet the specifications. Drifts during operation must be corrected between two pulses by mechanically adjusting the inductance of the coil in the generator as well as the primary capacitor voltage. This adjustment process is automated by acquiring the current pulse waveform with sufficient time and amplitude resolution, calculating the corrections needed and applying these corrections to the hardware for the next pulse. A very cost-effective and practical solution for this adjustment process is the integration of off-the-shelf commercially available boards into an active digital control loop. A 16-bit fixed point, 33 MIPS, DSP together with a 12-bit, 500 kSPS, ADC (total cost of under 250 $) has been used for this control process. The correction algorithm developed for the DSP uses Fuzzy Logic reasoning

Exact 4He Spectral Function in a Semirealistic NN Potential Model

The spectral function of 4He is calculated with the Lorentz integral transform method in a large energy and momentum range. The excitation spectrum of the residual 3N-system is fully taken into account. The obtained spectral function is used to calculate the quasi elastic longitudinal (e,e') response R_l of 4He for q=300, 400, and 500 MeV/c. Comparison with the exact R_l shows a rather sizeable disagreement except in the quasi elastic peak, where the differences reduce to about 10% at q=500 MeV/c. It is shown as well that very simple momentum distribution approximations for the spectral function provide practically the same results for R_l as the exact spectral function.Comment: 7 pages, Latex (Revtex), 4 Postscript figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Investigating students’ self-perceived affective learning during classroom interaction involvement at a South African University

Despite the importance of affective learning as a gateway to learning, it has been neglected in university curricula in many parts of the world. Subsequently, in formal classroom teaching, the bulk of the teachers’ efforts typically go into the cognitive aspects of the teaching and learning and most of the classroom time is earmarked for cognitive outcomes. However, research has shown that the affective domain develops well-rounded students with broad abilities and consequently many scholars advocate for the incorporation of the affective domain in university curricula. Therefore, the aim of this article was to establish and understand the self-perceived affective learning of the university students in order to match their emotions to the process of teaching and learning. The study was quantitative in nature and a survey design was followed. The Attribution theory was used to anchor the study. A randomly selected sample of 127 first-year students registered for Linguistics was used to collect data. A questionnaire was used to collect data and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyse data. With regards to students’ self-perceived perceptiveness during classroom interaction involvement, the findings revealed that the majority of students were very perceptive to the meaning of others’ behaviour in relation to themselves and the situation. Concerning the students’ self-perceived attentiveness during classroom interaction involvement, the majority of students reported that they were very observant of others’ reactions while speaking during classroom conversation. Finally, regarding students’ self-perceived responsiveness during classroom interaction involvement, the students indicated that they felt confident during their conversation in class, and were sure of what to say and do

Design aspects related to the reliability of the LHC beam dump kicker systems

The two LHC beam dump kicker systems consist each of 14 pulse generator and magnet subsystems. Their task is to extract on request the beams in synchronisation with the gap in the beam. This operation must be fail-safe to avoid disastrous consequences due to loss of the beam inside the LHC. Only a failing operation of one of the 14 pulse generators is allowed. To preserve this tolerance premature beam dumps are forced immediately after early detection of internal faults. However, these faults should occur rarely in order not to be a source of undesirable downtime of the LHC. The report determines first the level of reliability required for the main components of the system. In particular faults which could cause spontaneously non-synchronised beam dumps are identified. Then, technical solutions are evaluated on failure behaviour. Those having a most likely failure mode which does not cause dump triggers are favoured. These solutions need redundancy and are more complex but have the advantage to be fault tolerant. The design goal can be achieved with a combination of high quality components, redundant signal paths, fault tolerant subsystems, continuous surveillance and check-list validation tests before the start of the injection of beam in the LHC

The Single-Particle Spectral Function of 16O^{16}{\rm O}

The influence of short-range correlations on the $p$-wave single-particle spectral function in $^{16}{\rm O}$ is studied as a function of energy. This influence, which is represented by the admixture of high-momentum components, is found to be small in the $p$-shell quasihole wave functions. It is therefore unlikely that studies of quasihole momentum distributions using the $(e,e'p)$ reaction will reveal a significant contribution of high momentum components. Instead, high-momentum components become increasingly more dominant at higher excitation energy. The above observations are consistent with the energy distribution of high-momentum components in nuclear matter.Comment: 5 pages, RevTeX, 3 figure