The recent arrival of beamline equipment from CERN to Daresbury Laboratory marks a significant milestone in the construction of four cryomodules for the high luminosity upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Key deliveries
This first set of beamline components to be delivered to the site included:
- 2x double quarter wave (DQW) crab cavities
- 2x power couplers
- 6x beam screen bellows
- Vacuum equipment and fasteners
The project team from Technology, ASTeC and the Cockcroft Institute wasted no time in getting to work on the elements.
So far, that work has covered:
- Ultra high vacuum cleaning and qualification of beamscreen bellows
- Cavity incoming radio frequency checks
- Assembly tooling cleaning and pre-assembly
- Production of detailed build procedures (233 pages approved so far)
The team has also been preparing six plug-in modules (PIMs) which are an integral part of the cryomodule build. Vacuum specialists worked with technicians on the week-long process for each module to get them as particulate clean as possible. This included high pressure cleaning in purified water, residual gas analysis and pumping them out to remove as many particles as possible.
The results brought the modules up to ISO 4 standards – meaning that there were less than 10,000 of the smallest particles per cubic metre. For context, 'normal’ air contains an average of 10 trillion trillion particles per cubic metre.
From pre-series to series build cryomodules
The team of experts delivered a pre-series cryomodule to CERN back in 2023. This was used for testing and validation of the radio frequency dipole crab cavities.
Each cryomodule takes around a year to complete, though as the project goes on the team will be working on two concurrently.
Hi Lumi LHC UK Crab Cavity Cryomodules Work Package Lead, Nik Templeton said: “Receiving our first set of LHC crab cavity beamline components is a significant milestone, marking the commencement of our series cryomodule builds. We’re thankful to our CERN partners for their efforts to design, develop and deliver the £3 million package of equipment.
“The UK team has worked hard over the last year to implement continuous improvement and develop lessons learned from the RFD build, putting us in great stead going forward, but with a twist – a bit like the crab cavities!”
For more information on the high luminosity LHC work, visit the CERN website.
A job weld done on the Hi-Lumi upgrade.
Image: Isaac Blake, Nike Templeton, Susan Shirling, Luke Bladen, Matt Clarke and Angeliza Robinson with one of the custom made transportation cases. Credit: STFC
This article was originally written and posted on STFC's LinkedIn page.
