The Control System of CERN Accelerators Vacuum (LS1 Activities and New Developments)

Abstract

After 3 years of operation, the LHC entered its first Long Shutdown period (LS1), in February 2013 [1]. Major consolidation and maintenance works are being performed across the whole CERN’s Accelerator chain, in order to prepare the LHC to restart at higher energy, in 2015. The injector chain shall resume earlier, in mid-14. We report about the on-going vacuum-controls projects. Some of them concern the renovation of the controls of certain machines; others are associated with the consolidations of the vacuum systems of LHC and its injectors; and a few are completely new installations. ue to the wide age-span of the existing vacuum installations, there is a mix of design philosophies and of control-equipment generations. The renovations and the novel projects offer an opportunity to improve the uniformity and efficiency of vacuum controls by: reducing the number of equipment versions with similar functionality; identifying, naming, labelling, and documenting all pieces of equipment; homogenizing the control architectures, while converging to a common software framework