A new particle accelerator, called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is currently under development at CERN in Geneva. It will be the most powerful accelerator in the world, allowing protons to collide at an energy of 14 TeV. Of the four experiments to be performed at the LHC, ATLAS is one of the two largest. The detector and each of its subdetectors need to be controlled by a Detector Control System (DCS). A DCS is built up by many units, both hardware and software. The top software layer is the SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) system, which interfaces operators to the control system as well as performing automatic monitoring and control.
This master thesis focuses in particular on the DCS for one of the ATLAS subdetectors, the Semiconductor Tracker (SCT). The task was divided into two parts. The first was to implement a control system for the Pixel/SCT cooling system, used for studying the performance of the first full-scale system currently being developed by the ST group at CERN. This included setting up hardware and developing a software SCADA system using PVSS II. The second task was to evaluate a barometric pressure sensor, a Lucas NovaSensor NPP-301, for radiation hardness.
A control system has been set up, using ATLAS DCS standard components, such as ELMBs, CANbus, CANopen OPC server and a PVSS II application. The system has been calibrated in order to correct for electronics imperfection. The maximum temperature error is now ¡0.7¡ÆC. The developed system is running stable but there are further needs for development, such as dynamic configuration of datapoints at start-up and conforming datapoints entirely to SCT DCS standard. It was also found that the pressure sensor is radiation hard up to a radiation of 2¡¤1014 1 MeV neutron equivalents/cm2.
Author: Wallin, Per-Olof
Source: Luleå University of Technology
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