Motorization and low-level control of the LHC collimators

by Mr Alessandro Masi (CERN, EN-STI)

Friday 2 Oct 2009, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Zurich

TE Auditorium (CERN)

The LHC will be protected against uncontrolled beam losses by the collimation system, which is made of more than 100 collimators each equipped with two moveable jaws of different materials. The nominal LHC stored beam energy is 362 MJ, therefore a great care has been taken in the choice, design and optimization of the low-level control solution. The LHC collimators low level control system manages the position and angle of the jaws with an accuracy of a few microns, and monitors the actual position against errors with respect to the desired position at a rate of up to 100 Hz, triggering a fast beam dump in case of problems. Stepping motors have been chosen to have an accurate open loop positioning, while LVDTs and resolvers monitor the axes. The National Instruments PXI platform has been adopted as real-time low-level hardware. In this seminar the criteria followed in the selection of sensors, motorization and low-level control platforms are reviewed. The entire control architecture based on the standard LHC controls is presented together with the low-level custom solutions implemented to fulfill the tight project requirements. At the end a detailed performance review of the entire system is provided.

Paper Masi_long_abstract.pdf

Slides EN_Seminar_AMasi.pdf EN_Seminar_AMasi.pptx