Two stories

23 DECEMBER,2021 | By François Butin, Anastazja S and the gas team

THE GAS CONTROL SYSTEM – MAKING IT ALIVE

In EA-AS we also create, design and implement the control systems for gas installations of North and East Area, first one in building 908 is already in service since beginning of this year- operating 5 gas cabinets with: Neon, CF4, Hydrogen, C2H6 and CH4. Three others are becoming live beginning of the next year (building 907, 157 and 909). The whole process of control system formation could be compared to structure of human body as indeed the control system is alive semi-independent organism. The spine of it is our raw gas installation, in this case a gas cabinet, gas panels and piping – no automation here yet. The rest of the skeleton needs to be added to make it work as one unified structure: cabling, control rack with electrical components, network connection, supply of power, safety. Afterwards, when the “body” is almost ready the Functional Analysis consisting of process decomposition, stepper, working principle and of each gas unit type is like growing organs of the human body: each one of them has its functionality, they are dependent of each other, and only well-defined coordination could make them work smoothly together. Later, by creating instances of each defined type (meaning adding particular cases that share the same functionality but will be operating different gases) is like injecting the blood making everything to be connected together and allowing information exchange. For example, if flammable gas leak will be detected, all other racks in the same room will be switched off mitigating the risk of explosion.

The heart of the control system is a hardware with PLC controller that has a potential to monitor, coordinate and give command to the whole set-up. However, it desperately needs a brain that brings instructions in a form of a logic and control program. That allow us to read the statuses of gas units remotely, check their condition and program some automatic actions on the system as well as share information with gas users if needed. At the end comes a nervous system which reassures secure and safe operation, implementation of the alarms and gas leak recognition.

As a final product we see few screens, but without functional body, well programmed brain and all what is under the skin – the human body won’t work very well

BE-EA and the LHC MoEDAL – MAPP Experiment

MoEDAL (Monopole & Exotics Detector At LHC) is a small passive experiment that has been operating in LHCb cavern for the past 10 years, in search for «Magnetic Monopoles». The collaboration proposed to expand into a new location for installing a much bigger and active detector called MAPP (MoEDAL Apparatus for Penetrating Particles). The tunnel that was initially envisaged for the implementation implied a very large infrastructure investment (~½ MCHF), with many restrictive implications on involved services, as well as safety challenges and schedule constraints incompatible allowinf for operation during run 3. Our group stepped-in as of May 2021 to assist the collaboration in their new endeavour.

We were able to indentify a couple of new possible locations, and eventually negociate with LHC coordination, HSE representatives, the BE and EP DSO office plus a number of service groups to offer for MAPP a new long-term experimental area within the UA83 gallery. After a fast approval process, the works started in november 2021 and the new experimental area will be ready for operation with MAPP already as of February 2022.

The MAPP detector will consist of two basic subdetectors: (i) a core mini(milli)-charged particle (mQP) detector MAPP-mQP, and (ii) the very long-lived weakly interacting neutral particle detector called MAPP-LLP.

Our help was instrumental during the LHCC and RB approval for MoEDAL to pursue their quest for these elusive particles with new MAPP detector in UA83, leading to an effective implementation, safe areas, pleasant working conditions, technical challenges for good physics and happy users: These are BE-EA «raison d’être»!