BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
The next generation of high-energy nuclear physics experiments involve colliding high-energy electrons with ions, as well as colliding polarized electrons with polarized protons and polarized helions (Helium-3 nuclei). The eRHIC project proposes to add an electron accelerator to the RHIC complex, thus allowing all of these types of experiments to be done by combining existing capabilities with high energy and high intensity electrons. In this paper we describe the controls systems requirements for eRHIC, the technical challenges, and our vision of a control system ten years into the future. What we build over the next ten years will be what is used for the ten years following the start of operations. This presents opportunities to take advantage of changes in technologies but also many challenges in building reliable and stable controls and integrating those controls with existing RHIC systems. This also presents an opportunity to leverage on state of the art innovations and build collaborations both with industry and other institutions, allowing us to build the best and most cost effective set of systems that will allow eRHIC to achieve its goals.
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, USA
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
The RHIC Beam Permit System (BPS) monitors the health of RHIC subsystems and takes active decisions regarding beam-abort and magnet power dump, upon a subsystem fault. The reliability of BPS directly impacts the RHIC downtime, and hence its availability. This work assesses the probability of BPS failures that could lead to substantial downtime. A fail-safe condition imparts downtime to restart the machine, while a failure to respond to an actual fault can cause potential machine damage and impose significant downtime. This paper illustrates a modular multistate reliability model of the BPS, with modules having exponential lifetime distributions. The model is based on the Competing Risks Theory with Crude Lifetimes, where multiple failure modes compete against each other to cause a final failure, and simultaneously influence each other. It is also dynamic in nature as the number of modules varies based on the fault trigger location. The model is implemented as a Monte Carlo simulation in Java, and analytically validated. The eRHIC BPS will be an extension of RHIC BPS. This analysis will facilitate building a knowledge base rendering intelligent decision support for eRHIC BPS design.
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, USA
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
The RHIC Beam Permit System (BPS) plays a key role in safeguarding against the anomalies developing in the collider during a run. The BPS collects RHIC subsystem statuses to allow the beam entry and its existence in the machine. The building blocks of BPS are Permit Module (PM) and Abort Kicker Module (AKM), which incorporate various electronic boards based on VME specification. This paper presents a quantitative Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) of the PM and AKM, yielding the hazard rates of three top failures that are potential enough to cause a significant downtime of the machine. The FTA helps tracing down the top failure of the module to a component level failure (such as an IC or resistor). The fault trees are constructed for all module variants and are probabilistically evaluated using an analytical solution approach. The component failure rates are calculated using manufacturer datasheets and MIL-HDBK-217F. The apportionment of failure modes for components is calculated using FMD-97. The aim of this work is to understand the importance of individual components of the RHIC BPS regarding its reliable operation, and evaluate their impact on the operation of BPS.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
For a number of years there has been an increasing desire to adopt a synoptic display suite within BNL accelerator community. Initial interest in the precursors to the modern display suites like MEDM quickly fizzled out as our users found them aesthetically unappealing and cumbersome to use. Subsequent attempts to adopt Control System Studio (CSS) also fell short when work on the abstraction bridge between CSS and our control system stalled and was eventually abandoned. Most recently, we tested the open source version of a synoptic display developed at Fermilab. It, like its previously evaluated predecessors, also seemed rough around the edges, however a few implementation details made it more appealing than every single previously mentioned solution and after a brief evaluation we settled on Synoptic as our display suite of choice. This paper describes this adoption process and goes into details on several key changes and improvements made to the original implementation – a few of which made us rethink how we want to use this tool in the future.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
The eRHIC electron beams will be damaging both directly and as a result of synchrotron radiation. The machine protection and abort systems will be designed to prevent any equipment damage from the electron beams. In this paper we will review the requirements for the machine protection systems and the plans we have put into place to better evaluate the failure probabilities, beam abort systems designs, and overall machine protection systems designs. The machine protection systems will include a beam permit system that has inputs from loss monitors, power supplies, superconducting RF monitors, vacuum chamber heating monitors, water temperature, quench detectors, access controls systems, vacuum monitors, and longer term beam lifetime or slow loss monitors. There are three systems associated with the machine protection and beam abort systems; the beam permit link, the abort kicker systems, and the beam dumps. We describe the requirements for these systems and present our current plans for how to meet the requirements.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
The NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) at BNL uses many different beams to do experiments associated with evaluating the possible risks to astronauts in space environments. This facility became operational in 2003 and operates from the AGS Booster synchrotron. In order to simulate the space radiation environment some of these experiments need to make use of beams of various energies. To simulate solar flare events, we implemented the Solar Particle Simulator in 2005. This system put in modifications to the accelerator controls to allow beam energies to be changed automatically, enabling target samples to be irradiated with many energies of the same type of ion, without having to make use of degraders. To simulate Galactic Cosmic events, they need to also be able to automatically change the ions used to irradiate a single sample. This project aims to allow NSRL to change ions as well as beam energies within a very short period of time. To do this requires modifications to existing controls as well as building new controls for a laser ion source. In this paper we describe NSRL, our plans to implement the Galactic Cosmic Event Simulator, and the status of the laser ion source.