WAO 2010
Reliability Session Astract

Laurent Hardy


Reliability has become a central factor in the physics and operations of particle accelerators. In the design of new facilities, cost, performance and availability must all be considered.This is not only true of accelerators with a wide base of users as synchrotron light sources, spallation neutron sources and medical accelerators who require uptime in excess of 90%,but also of high energy accelerators, where the sheer system size and complexity requires an explicit availability goal from the design stage.Whereas several years ago, the emphasis was in fact only on technical performances of equipment, a high level of equipment reliability is now requested from the onset.It is imperative to take reliability into account at the machine and system design stage and at all levels. There are general and specific ways to accomplish this, for instance:
- attentive choice of materials (i.e. radiation damage)
- choice of electronic components
- use of computer simulation (of heat, friction, mechanical stress, etc)
- accessibility to the critical components for a quick repairs
- quality control- optimization of number of subsystems
- cost versus availability optimization
- established technologies
- compact and modular design approaches
- design margins- transient data recording and data logging
- This session will emphasize your own experience and practices in your laboratory.
Up to what level have you taken into account the reliability factor when designing a piece of equipment?
What have been the main criteria to insure reliability?
At installation time, did you wish you had done better at the design stage?
What would you do differently the next time?

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