June 28, 2015 to July 2, 2015
JW Marriott Starr Pass Resort
Etc/GMT-7 timezone

5-year operation experience with the 1.8 K refrigeration units of the LHC cryogenic system

Jul 1, 2015, 2:45 PM
15m
Tucson Ballroom CD

Tucson Ballroom CD

Contributed Oral Presentation CEC-01 - Large-Scale Refrigeration and Liquefaction C3OrE - Operating Experience II

Speaker

Gerard Ferlin (CERN)

Description

Since 2009, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is in operation at CERN. The LHC superconducting magnets distributed over eight sectors of 3.3-km long are cooled at 1.9 K in pressurized superfluid helium. The nominal operating temperature of 1.9 K is produced by eight 1.8-K refrigeration units based on centrifugal cold compressors (3 or 4 stages depending to the vendor) combined with warm volumetric screw compressors with sub-atmospheric suction. After about 5 years of continuous operation, we will present the results concerning the availability for the final user of these refrigeration units and the impact of the design choice on the recovery time after a system trip. We will also present the individual results for each rotating machinery in terms of failure origin and of Mean Time between Failure (MTBF), as well as the consolidations and upgrades applied to these refrigeration units.

Author

Co-authors

Presentation materials