Division of systems engineering

« Irfu's mechanical and thermal design office »

The Design, studies and preliminary projects laboratory (LCAP) is the "mechanical and thermal design office" in charge of the architecture and design of instruments, at the service of Irfu's projects.

The laboratory is structured around three areas of expertise: electrical engineering, power electronics and instrumentation. These areas of expertise are divided into the following activities:

• Studies, realizations, commissioning and maintenance in electrical engineering associated with the control-command of Irfu experiments. These cover all equipment located between the supervision station and the experiment. It includes electrical distribution, protection of equipment and persons, integration of control-command devices (PLCs, VME) and their interface terminals, fieldbus components, signal conditioners and their connection to sensors, as well as actuators and devices installed on experiments. The latest achievements include the IFMIF and SPIRAL 2 accelerators, the JT60 superconducting magnet test station and the cryogenic process controls for the CHYMENE, MINOS and LOTUS targets.

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• Specification, study and testing of power supplies and associated components for superconducting magnets, beam sources and their test stations. This activity includes, among others, the supply of the R3B superconducting magnet, of the JT60 coils, the 1ppm stabilized supply and a superconducting shunt for the ISEULT MRI magnet, the high voltage supplies of the IFMIF injector and the IPHI source.

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• Instrumentation specific to Irfu experiments: sensors, actuators and dedicated measuring equipment. These included the motorization of fingers, flaps and slits for the S3 spectrometer and SPIRAL2 accelerator, Laser-Tracker geodetic surveys for the XFEL accelerator, cryogenic motorizations for the EUCLID satellite filter wheels, the ICOS greenhouse gas measurement station process and the ALEXIA drug preparation system.

The size and complexity of physics experiments lead the laboratory to rely more and more on the industrial environment through subcontracting.

Specific means and equipment: the laboratory has 3 workstations equipped with SEE-Electrical and Autocad softwares to carry out electrotechnical studies, a room dedicated to electrotechnical achievements, a coordinate-measuring machine, a laser tracker, cryostats, vacuum equipment and a set of physical measuring devices...

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Electrotechnical subcontracting

Power contactor

Spiral 2 control-command cabinets

Euclid spacecraft cryomechanisms

CMM measurements

Laser tracker measures

Electrotechnical CAD

DESY spectrometer control rack

Connecting an ICOS instrument box

Specific instrumentation wirings

Staff : 7 agents

The Industry Liaison Laboratory (ILL) is the interface between the engineering and design office, scientists, the procurement division of CEA and industrial companies. Its main purpose is to follow the studies and/or the manufacturing, entrusted to industrial companies, of complex mechanical equipment destined to physics instrumentation in the following fields :

• ground-based telescopes,
• space telescopes,
• detectors,
• particle accelerators components,
• particle sources and targets, including associated shieldings.

The ILL main activity and expertise fields are described below.

The instrumental electronics laboratory is in charge of developing electronic systems to measure, control or secure equipment for research in physics.