As usual with the acting scheduling physicist in place we get some information on RHIC status; some of it even humerous. enjoy Flemming ---------------------------------------------------------------- Flemming Videbaek Physics Department Brookhaven National Laboratory e-mail: videbaek@bnl.gov phone: 631-344-4106 ----- Original Message ----- From: Kin Yip To: kinyip@fnal.gov Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 10:49 PM Subject: A-SPY news: Maintenance went well ... cell phone left in the IR ====== Acting Scheduling Physicist -YIP (ie. A-SPY) news channel ======== *********************************************************************************************** (0) Christoph Montag should be back on Friday to take back his duty. This is probably my last email before that. I may need to do the "acting" role near the end of the RHIC run. *********************************************************************************************** (1) Maintenance went well.... Today's Maintenance itself went well. Though there were some down-time afterwards, they didn't seem to be related to the Maintenance itself. -- The smoke alarm problem in 2 o'clock tunnel was located and settled quite quickly. There was rather strong smell ... as a hindsight, one wonders why this was not quickly resolved Sat. night. Well, hindsight is always 20/20. -- BRAHMS' D2 magnet problem which apparently aborted the beam very early Wed. morning was fixed. -- PHENIX air-conditioning and switching from the water tower system to the chiller system was also quite easily done. It was so quick that they didn't even need to power off the electronics as they had planned to. It was well within the planned 4 hours. -- There was a vacuum leak problem during the polarized-proton source maintenance and thus delayed the availability of the polarized-proton a little bit (~1.5 hours). No big deal. -- Even some limited switchyard work for the coming NASA AGS run has been done. *********************************************************************************************** (2) cell phone left in the IR The only more entertaining story that I could share was that, some time after the maintenance work was finished, a couple STAR experimenters needed to make Controlled Access to retrieve a cell-phone left in their experimental hall (IR 6). Very funny to me ! Well, we have lost a chance to test how "radiation-hard" the modern cell-phone is :-) This has fortunately been the most major "screw-up" that I know today. *********************************************************************************************** (3) 205 GeV run schedule NOT yet clear The fate and schedule for the ~205 GeV (beam energy ... => center-of-mass energy ~410 GeV ) run, which includes a 24 hour PHOBOS run is not yet clear. The decision is said to be made on the next RHIC machine experiment meeting which is right after the next Time Meeting (on Tuesday). More than a couple people have asked me about the next Maintenance Day. It's probably more meaningful to talk about it after next Tuesday's decision. Before today's Maintenance, (at 100 GeV), the yellow beam still seems to give us problem and we don't feel comfortable using more than 56 bunches in each ring. *********************************************************************************************** (4) Water tower ... chiller system --- wouldn't it be nice if we had only one ? There were 2 issues that I had some strong memory about related to the experimental support from our department during the last (FY2004) run. One was the feature that resetting STAR magnets would bring down PHENIX magnet as well. This has been fixed over the past summer/fall after a lot of efforts by our electrical engineers. ( I have pushed for this whenever I could. ) The other one was the "annual necessity" to decide on when to switch the cooling system, from water tower to the chiller. PHENIX has switched to the chiller system today whereas STAR hasn't. If STAR needs to do the switch in the coming month, it would require a couple hours' down-time. STAR didn't switch today because they think/gamble the weather in the coming week wouldn't be too warm and the water tower system still has substantial un-used capacity. They are afraid that if they do the switch and the weather is not warm enough, the chiller system would short-cycle (on and then off very quickly) and this may break the chiller ==> major repair work would then be required. Before yesterday afternoon, I thought they'd do the switch during today's Maintenance. But they didn't. The uncertainty of the switch last year had haunted me for more than a month. Depending on the weather, their position was like "switch ... not switch ... switch ... not switch ..." ! I have thought, by not playing the dating games, I could avoid troubles like that ("love me, love me not, love me ...") but ... ! I'm not the regular Scheduling Physicist this year but today it just refreshes my memory --- maybe with some exaggeration. Wouldn't it be nice if we have one system which would work all-year round, without the necessity to switch ? I don't know how (unfortunately). Sorry for my whining about it ..... :-( *********************************************************************************************** ======= ====== ======= ======= ====== ======= ======= ====== ======= Kin Yip Micro-Management Ltd. Tel.: x4116 Pager: x4300 ================================================================= Disclaimer: Whatever is being said here is not always 100% accurate though I try my best to avoid being 100% inaccurate :-) +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ _______________________________________________ Brahms-l mailing list Brahms-l@lists.bnl.gov http://lists.bnl.gov/mailman/listinfo/brahms-lReceived on Thu May 19 09:28:18 2005
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