Daresbury Laboratory gives PIP-II cryomodule a warm welcome
Colleagues at STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory have recently waved goodbye to a long-awaited visitor from the United States after a week-long stay. And who was that visitor? Well actually, it was a prototype accelerator cryomodule in a transportation frame, all the way from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois!
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The cryomodule’s trip to Daresbury was part of an important transport validation program. Three of these 10 metre-long cryomodules will be built at Daresbury Laboratory, as part of the UK’s contribution to the Proton Improvement Plan-II accelerator (PIP-II). Given the immense size and cost of the cryomodules (each contain a string of six super conducting cavities that form a section of accelerator beam line), it is imperative that the commissioned modules arrive at Fermilab in pristine condition.
Mitchell Kane, a Mechanical Engineer at the lab, was given the task of designing the transportation system which will cradle the cryomodules in their trip halfway around the world. After four years of work by an integrated team of experts from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) at Saclay, and led by STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory, this shipment was the biggest test for the frame yet.
Last year, a dummy cryomodule made from concrete was loaded onto the frame and taken on some of the bumpiest roads around Chicago to test its stability, and later transported to and from Daresbury Laboratory. Those initial results were promising, so this was the next step of the process.
The prototype cryomodule flew on a cargo plane from Fermilab to Luxembourg, with scientist Jeremiah Holzbauer and Senior Technician Adam Wixson, also from Fermilab. Once they were happy it had travelled well, it was loaded onto a lorry for the trip across Europe.
A warm welcome on a cold day
It was one of the coldest days of the year when the transportation frame and its escorts arrived on Friday 1 December, but they were given the warmest of welcomes by the Daresbury team.
Mitchell and his colleagues worked with the Fermilab team, to carefully guide the huge lorry through the loading gates and into the hall. But this was only the beginning. Next, they had to attach it to the crane hoists and lift it gently, as gently as possible when it weighs 20 tonnes, and get it onto terra firma so that both the frame and the cryomodule could be examined.
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The following week was spent examining the frame and the prototype module for signs of damage caused by transportation. Readings were taken from sensors attached to the transportation frame to determine how much movement there had been on the roads. Mike Lowe and Dan White from the electrical group then had the painstaking task of checking each of the hundreds of sensors on the cryomodule to verify that all the electrical components had survived intact.
“The months of planning and coordinated efforts between STFC, FNAL, and our logistics partners enabled the successful completion of the transport test”, explains Mitchell Kane. “This was the final proof of the transportation system design, which will now be used for the three STFC-built cryomodules.”
The team had to repeat the welcome process in reverse order to get the cryomodule back into its transportation frame, on the crane, on the truck and back on the road. It has arrived back at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the United States, 6 days later.
Daresbury Laboratory teams are gearing up ready to build three of the 23 cryomodules needed to power the 215 metre-long linear accelerator. This in turn drives the neutrino beam, which will travel 1,300 kilometres straight through the planet from Illinois to South Dakota.
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