Author: Steckert, J.
Paper Title Page
THPPD026 Splice Resistance Measurements in the LHC Main Superconducting Magnet Circuits by the New Quench Protection System 3557
 
  • Z. Charifoulline, K. Dahlerup-Petersen, R. Denz, A.P. Siemko, J. Steckert
    CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
 
  The interconnections between the LHC main magnets are made of soldered joints (splices) of two superconducting cables stabilized by a copper bus bar. After the 2008 LHC incident, caused by a defective interconnection, a new layer of high resolution magnet circuit quench protection (nQPS) has been developed and integrated with the existing systems. It allowed mapping of the resistances of all superconducting splices during the 2009 commissioning campaign. Since April 2010, when the LHC was successfully restarted at 3.5TeV, every bus bar interconnection is constantly monitored by the nQPS electronics. The acquired data are saved to the LHC Logging Database. The paper will briefly describe the data analysis method and will present the results from the two years of resistance measurements. Although no splice was found with resistance higher than 3.3nOhm and no significant degradation in time was observed so far, the monitoring of splices will stay active till the end of LHC 3.5TeV run. The detected outliers will be repaired during the Splice Consolidation Campaign in 2013-2014.  
 
THPPD031 Measurement of the Residual Resistivity Ratio of the Bus Bars Copper Stabilizer of the 13 kA Circuits of the LHC 3572
 
  • A. Apollonio, S.D. Claudet, M. Koratzinos, R. Schmidt, A.P. Siemko, M. Solfaroli Camillocci, J. Steckert, H. Thiesen, A.P. Verweij
    CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
 
  After the incident of September 2008, the operational beam energy of the LHC has been set to 3.5 TeV, since not all joints of the superconducting busbars between magnets have the required quality for 7 TeV operation. This choice is based on simulations to determine the safe current in the main dipole and quadrupole magnets, reproducing the thermal behavior of a quenched superconducting joint by taking into account all relevant factors that affect a possible thermal runaway. One important parameter of the simulation is the RRR (Residual Resistivity Ratio) of the copper stabilizer of the busbar connecting superconducting magnets. A dedicated campaign to measure this quantity for the main 13kA circuits of the LHC on all sectors was performed during the Christmas stop in December 2010 and January 2011. The measurement method as well as the data analysis and results are presented in this paper.