DOE OSTI2021
The MQXFA production series quadrupoles being built for the Hi-Lumi (HL) LHC upgrade by the US Accelerator Upgrade Project (US-HL-LHC AUP) will have very limited instrumentation for characterizing quench events that occur during magnet training and performance validation testing. In order to understand the origin of the quenches, and whether they have some implication for ongoing magnet fabrication, it was decided to build a full-length Quench Antenna (QA) with axial resolution of 50mm to be employed during cold testing in the anticryostat used for magnetic measurements. The goal is to have fineresolution, full-length coverage detection of quench events axially, as well as to have azimuthal resolution on the order of the cable width (about 1 degree for the cross-section), in a device that can be used both for vertical and horizontal testing. To achieve this, a 5m long QA with 128 channels of high-speed data acquisition has been designed and fabricated. The cylindrical antenna features an array of 12 full-length, dipole- and quadrupole-bucked coils positioned radially in the QA interior for azimuthal localization, and over 100 individual channels of short, high-sensitivity, antennas etched as flexible PCB circuits (which also buck dipole and quadrupole fields) wrapped circumferentially on the cylinder exterior in steps of 50mm along the magnet length for axial detection. This report discusses the design, construction and analysis of the MQXFA QA, and first results from using the antenna during quench testing in the production magnets.
75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗