A welcome address from WAO hosts, via the administration of the Collider-Accelerator Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory
A welcome address to the WAO from the administration of NSLS-II facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Welcome and orientation to WAO 2018, from International Program Committee Chair
In 2011 FNAL began a transition from a multi-program colliding beams facility to a multi-program fix target facility with an emphasis on Neutrino and Muon physics. This transition is now complete...how has it affected the laboratory, and the operations department? What's in store for the future? This is "How We Do Business" now.
The International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility (IFMIF) aims to provide an accelerator-based, D-Li neutron source to produce high energy neutrons at sufficient intensity and irradiation volume for DEMO materials qualification. The IFMIF/EVEDA project, which is part of the Broader Approach (BA) agreement between Japan and EURATOM, has the mission to work on the engineering design of...
Cern accelerator complex is composed of many operation tools and systems. These tools are vital to achieve high performance and reliable operation. Operation Tools are interfaced with the middleware. This will allow the operator to diagnose and optimise high level accelerator machine parameters. A good operation skill is needed to use these devices. This talk will describe the role and the...
The main tasks of SuperKEKB operators are beam tuning, safety management and operation logging.
In order to ensure these tasks, the operators may create some applications.
Several applications were created by operators under the guidance of staff.
Meanwhile, some applications, created by the operator himself, to ensure work.
In this time, we will introduce various applications created by...
The Galactic Cosmic Ray (GCR) Simulator project at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) was developed to assess the biological risks of exposure to the wide variety of ion species (and energies) that would be experienced on manned space missions outside the protection provided in Low Earth Orbit. In recent years tools have been developed to enable rapid,...
Orbit Display is an operator-created application that displays real-time data from over 100 beam position monitors. Originally written for the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) accelerator, it has also been successfully ported to a different machine and control system at the European XFEL. This talk will discuss how an operator perspective influenced the design, the architecture of the...
One of the main issues of the linac operation problems in the PLS-II is injection efficiency for top-up mode to keep radiation safety levels. The energy spread of the injection beam is the main beam parameter to effect injection efficiency. So we try to develop several operational software tools to reduce the amount of energy spread. And also beam energy jitter is another parameter for...
Rebuilding and updating the Fermilab Main Control Room to increase efficiency and aesthetics, and to enable easier future upgrades.
INTRODUCTION: designed and built in the first decade of the new Millennium, the fully digital PSI Main Control Room has now been in Operation for over a decade.
During this period demands on infrastructure and services have constantly risen.
METHODS: Designed for an estimated thermal power of 12kW, our cooling systems today have to handle 18kW of waste heat.
The installed system with...
FERMI@Elettra is the first fully seeding-based FEL. This talk is an overview of how the Control Room Operator see and control the FEL Photo Injection Laser and the FEL Seed Laser during experiment and beam preparation. Details of activities, panels and troubleshooting will be given.
Operations at National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) require the coordination of many critical systems and subsystems. The majority of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for these systems were developed individually as needed during the early stages of commissioning as the facility was coming online. As the NSLS-II has become an operational facility, however, ease of use has...
Defining effective organizational structure for research labs is a contextually challenging issue in the field of systems engineering. Maintaining a balance between subsystem autonomy and system cohesion has proven difficult to achieve throughout R&D industry. Multiple system perspectives are always present across divisions and project based funding contributes to competing priorities. ...
The injection efficiency is an important parameter for synchrotron light sources operating in top-up mode like the 3.0 GeV ALBA synchrotron light source located in Barcelona, as the Storage Ring (SR) is periodically refilled with the Front Ends open while the users take data continuously. A bad transmission makes injections longer and compromises data collection during refilling. At ALBA, the...
Like all complex systems, the operation of an accelerator or a chain of accelerators is heavily guided by the physics that governs motions of charged particles. While this has been the theme for most of the cases, it has been also shown that an experienced operator is indispensable for achieving best beam performance for the users even if she is not at all fluent in the most sophisticated...
At SLAC; there is a very active machine development program that constantly strives to expand the capabilities of LCLS-I. Furthermore, users often require very specialized modes of running that require a high level of expertise to set up. This necessitates a high level of cooperation and knowledge-sharing among operators and physicists, especially as we begin to commission two new injectors...
After a 2-years shutdown period, in which extensive refurbishment and modernization measures were carried out (including civil construction work in preparation of the GSI connection to FAIR), the entire GSI accelerator chain was put back into operation for the research program of FAIR Phase 0. Additionally, the largest part of the accelerator facility should be controlled with the new FAIR...
ESS will start commissioning summer 2018. We present the process we follow in order to ensure a safe commissioning, including the license process, the Ready Review process, training of operators, and the creation of an Operations Team.
After the Long Shutdown 1 (LS1) a working group with the mandate to review the LHC injector re-commissioning strategy was created beginning of 2015. Now with 4 years experience restarting the Proton Synchrotron Complex machines, the team is preparing the restart after Long Shutdown 2 (LS2), which will take place during 2019-2020, hosting an extensive upgrade campaign for the LHC injectors....
The superconducting, recirculating electron accelerator S-DALINAC has been built in the 1980s at TU Darmstadt. The first beam was achieved in 1987 and since 1991 it is in full operation. The operation as well as further development and improvements of the machine are done mainly by students. This educational aspect leads to exchanging operators after a maximum of a few years. A lot of effort...
Accelerators and beam transport systems typically contain numerous beamline diagnostics to measure beam particles distributions, beam emittance, beam energy, to monitor beamline vacuum and beam loss etc. As with any aging beamline system, there are legacy diagnostics that are still effective, but replacements are not essential until inevitable. It was observed that diagnostics, including...
The linear accelerator at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has produced electron beams since 1967. Over the years, there have been many generations of upgrades, additions, removals, and reconfigurations of both the accelerator hardware and control system, but never a complete tear-down and replacement of the accelerator - bits and pieces of every generation of SLAC equipment remain in...
A 100-MeV proton linac at the KOMAC (Korea Multipurpose Accelerator Complex) is composed of a 50-keV microwave ion source, a 3-MeV four-vane-type RFQ, a 100-MeV DTL and 10 target stations for proton irradiation on samples from many application fields. The linac was commissioned in 2013 and the user service started in July 2013 with delivering proton beam to three target stations: one for a...
The Neutron and Muon source at RAL is a large scale facility, conceived over 30 years ago, consisting of a pulsed 800MeV rapid cycling synchrotron. The facility has tungsten-tantalum targets with a comprehensive suite of 36 different detectors, spread across 2 target stations.
The poster will document recent changes and its challenges to the Alarm Investigation Team (AIT). This team...
Every RHIC physics store is analyzed, with key components updated
to a spreadsheet, to identify and monitor any improvements or degra-
dations in performance. With physics stores lasting between 50 min-
utes (optimal store length of 7.3 GeV Au in Run14) and 20 hours (store
length of 100 GeV Zr and Ru stores in Run18), manual analysis be-
comes a time consuming endeavor. To reduce the time...
At the WAO2014 I presented the Operations Simulator software I have developed. The simulator provides a training and familiarisation platform for operators, students or visitors. Initially the simulator was developed to work on the main control room PCs, but this tied the ‘users’ to the main control room. To remove the control room ties the Simulator software (EPICS IOC, Cothread, and...
The first section of the ESS Linac (Ion Source and LEBT) will be commissioned during summer 2018. We will present the first results and which lessons we learned in order to prepare for commissioning the rest of the machine and how to grow the operations team.
Not so many "entry level" operators, for example with one year of experience, have enough knowledges and skills for accelerator operator. Their supervisors require high level skills as ideal operator, whereas "entry level" operators have many things to understand, gain experience and so on, and have not enough time to study. In order to eliminate the distinction between them, optimization of...
In addition to shift work in the control room, the operators perform secondary activities in various specialist groups during their normal working hours.
Secondary occupation in the division Insertion Device
Outside of shift work, we are involved in the maintenance of the insertion device of SLS and SwissFEL. These maintenance can only take place in the machine shutdown, which becomes a...
Operations at National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) require the coordination of many critical systems and subsystems. The majority of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for these systems were developed individually as needed during the early stages of commissioning as the facility was coming online. As the NSLS-II has become an operational facility, however, ease of use has...
The Isotope Separator On Line Device (ISOLDE) can profit from up to 60% of the protons the Proton Synchrotron Booster (PSB) can deliver. The protons are essential, to deliver the wide range of isotopes required. The machine supervisor main task is to guide the beam through the different sections of the facility and deliver it to the users. The team utilizes a variety of tools to perform the...
. At KOMAC (Korea Multi-purpose Accelerator Complex), a 100-MeV proton linac has been started to operate since 2013. Nowadays, the constructions of the total six beamlines are completed. Among them, 20 MeV or 100 MeV proton beam has been provided to various users through the three proton beam irradiation facilities.
The proton beam irradiation facilities could provide the pulsed proton beam...
Carbon-ion radiotherapy using Heavy Ion Medical Accelerator in Chiba (HIMAC) has been carried out since 1994. Over 11000 cancer patients have been treated with carbon beams having energies of between 56-430 MeV/u. The HIMAC has two injectors and provides heavy-ion beams for medical and experimental purposes. The first injector consists of two Electron-Cyclotron-Resonance (ECR) type...
Synchrotron SOLEIL is the 3rd generation French synchrotron light source. It has been in operation since 2007 providing photon beams to 29 beamlines with a maximum intensity of 500 mA, 5000 hours a year.
Since the beginning of 2018, the operation group has been migrating to JIRA Altassian Software as the unique tool for reporting failures. The tool was already used by the computing division...
American culture has accustomed us to working a third of a day for 5 out of 7 days. Certain times are preferred over others. Due to the fixed cost of cryogenic operations, running all day, every day is preferred for a given Run (ie the time between long maintenance periods). Staff load analysis recommends a crew of 2 Operators with a Crew Chief for oversight. How should the coverage be...
American culture has accustomed us to working a third of a day for 5 out of 7 days. Certain times are preferred over others. Due to the fixed cost of cryogenic operations, running all day, every day is preferred for a given Run (ie the time between long maintenance periods). Staff load analysis recommends a crew of 2 Operators with a Crew Chief for oversight. How should the coverage be...
Synchrotron SOLEIL is the third generation French synchrotron light source. It has been in operation since 2007, providing photon beams to 29 beamlines with a maximum intensity of 500 mA, 5000 hours a year.
2017 has been the second best year for SOLEIL with 98.7 % beam availability (98.9% in 2015) and 92 hours “mean time between failures” (MTBF) (105h in 2015). The target remains 99 % beam...
The IFMIF/EVEDA Linear Prototype Accelerator (LIPAc) is a prototype of the projected IFMIF accelerator. The installation and commissioning of LIPAc is progressing at Rokkasho Fusion Institute, QST (Japan). This prototype is aiming at accelerating a deuteron beam of 125 mA to 9 MeV in continuous wave mode (CW). Currently, the beam commissioning up to 5 MeV, so-called ‘Phase-B’, is underway at...
The information on one system and along time are very important for operation effectively. The information on one system includes system schematic, manual, wiring table, parameter setting, etc. The information along time includes trip information, maintanence information, etc. Collecting these information effectively can make us know what happend and what we should do next.
This presentation...
The Australian Synchrotron has always required extensive operational statistics for the accelerators documenting the frequency and severity of faults that interrupt user beam, as well as demands on the operators' time. For years this has been accomplished through the Systems Operations Log (SOL) a web based elog created for fault accounting and as general logging software developed entirely...
The Isotope Separator On Line Device (ISOLDE) is one of the oldest experiments at CERN. In 2017 ISOLDE celebrated 50 years of life. The latest addition to the ISOLDE facility is the HIE-ISOLDE project. A super conducting LINAC with 4 cryomodules, capable of reaching energies up to 10 MeV/u. Different isotopes are set up and delivered on time, almost on a weekly basis. In several cases even...
The MedAustron Particle Therapy Accelerator (MAPTA) is a synchrotron-based medical accelerator providing 60-250 MeV proton and 120-400 MeV/u carbon ion beams for tumour treatment and non-clinical research.
Clinical operation of MAPTA has started in December 2016 on one horizontal beamline supplying protons to one of the three foreseen treatment rooms. Since then, two additional beam lines –...
Beam stability is an important issue when operating a medical accelerator. To obtain an early indicator of the machine condition we have established a morning beam performance check taking place prior to the formal quality assurance of the medical physics experts. On the basis of the recorded data we have observed that the beam position in the HEBT, represented by the position on a profile...
With experience at next generation electron and ion accelerator facilities that spans his career, Dr. Willeke offers his perspective on the history of, and outlook to the future for, the efficient operation of accelerators presently in the design phase, such as the proposed electron-ion collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
ALBA is a 3 GeV storage ring running 6000 h per year. While in operation the control room is manned 24/7, while in shut downs only the morning shift is covered. The operators ensure efficient operation of the machine and provide support for the coordination of the tasks during the shut-down by working between 50 and 60% of their time in shift. The other 40 to 50% is dedicated to work in areas...
The Spallation Neutron Source is a user-oriented accelerator complex with a fully subscribed users list each run period. Most shutdowns are relatively short and packed with carefully coordinated activities to keep the accelerator running and occasionally integrate machine or instrument upgrades.
Accelerator Operators are asked to propose their shutdown projects and pick groups they will...
The accelerator-driven spallation neutron and muon source at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom is manned 24/7 all year round. The key to the success of the accelerator is the operators, who ensure the safe and efficient operation of the machine, working around the clock in shift crews of 3 people. In 2018 a new system has been introduced allowing crew members to spend some...
Will be described how the rotation of the operator shift has changed during the years in order to allowed a better cooperation into project not directly connected to machine operation and the impact of how this cooperation involve to the operator when in charge to the control room.
An overview about some projects realized by operator will be given.
Machine Learning has proven itself as a useful technique in a variety of applications. We have used machine learning techniques to provide an RF feedforward system to the NSLS-II linac to correct for long term drifts in the system. Prior to this, the operator needed to do the correction manually. The operators participated in every aspect of the process from generating the necessary...
From safe self driving cars to computers that can beat a human at the TV game Jeopardy; Machine learning algorithms are infiltrating many aspects of our lives. This paper will present an overview of algorithms being used at SLAC and elsewhere. The main focus will be on design and performance of programs used by operations to reduce tuning time.
At the Workshop on Accelerator Operations 2004 (WAO2004), Michael Epps, then the Accelerator Operations Deputy Group Leader at Jefferson Lab gave a talk called Accelerator Operations Training and Development Program which described a proposed training program which JLab was just beginning to develop at that time. So some 14 years down the road how has it worked out? This talk is a...
Moderators summarize the results of breakout session discussions
Final remarks and recognition on WAO 2018
A look forward to the next Workshop, 2 years hence; other workshop announcements
