CERN Project Targets Safety and Environment

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the fundamental building blocks of all things. LHC is the result of collaboration between 10,000+ scientists and engineers representing 500 academic institutes, laboratories, educational institutions and industrial companies worldwide.

Roy Kok, Kepware

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CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the fundamental building blocks of all things. LHC is the result of collaboration between 10,000+ scientists and engineers representing 500 academic institutes, laboratories, educational institutions and industrial companies worldwide.

Accelerator operation involves nuclear interactions between high-energy particles, which create ionizing-radiation fields, so constant reporting on radiation levels as well as on air and water quality is required. In addition, the system must adhere to IEC 61508 safety standards. CERN invested in a state-of-the-art radiation monitoring and alarming system for the LHC, known as The Radiation Monitoring System for the Environment and Safety (RAMSES).

RAMSES’ functional requirements include:

Monitoring radiation levels (on-line, local and remote displays) — Monitoring of ambient dose equivalent rates in the working environment from stray radiation or induced activity, and measurement of radioactivity in released air and water;

Alarm functions (local and remote) — radiation-level alarms based on ambient dose equivalent rates, technical alarms, and interlocks;

Long-term permanent and reliable data logging — measured values, events (radiation alarms, interlocks, system fault alarms, technical alarms), and system configuration and modifications.

CERN has designed its industrial automation project to do away with any silos of automation in order to create a completely integrated data environment that will result in a central communications center. This center also manages the conventional monitoring of water (pH, temperature, conductivity, and turbidity), air quality, wind speed and direction, and provides ambient dose equivalent and ambient dose equivalent rate measurements in the LHC underground areas and above ground, both inside and outside the CERN perimeter.

The system is comprised of approximately 300 radiation and environmental detectors (about 700 measurement channels) grouped into 150 monitoring stations. The hundreds of detectors are integrated with Siemens S7-200 PLCs and use Kepware’s OPC server technology, KEPServerEX, to achieve enhanced data exchange between OPC Clients and the PLCs. KEPServerEx’s Modbus driver is used to communicate with the Integrated Monitoring Station (IMS) which controls the hand and foot monitors (HFM), tools and material controller (PCM) and the site gate monitor (SGM).

Monitoring stations are comprised of a PLC and a touch panel that monitors measured values and alarms from the PLCs and generates plain text data files that are copied to the supervisory servers (SCADA servers). The servers 'inject’ the data into an Oracle relational database via the Oracle SQL Loader.

The communications system has become an integral facilitator of the exchange of data, providing seamless connectivity between the PLC protocols (Siemens and Modbus), the SCADA system (ARC Informatique’s PCVue) and the Oracle database. Due to the importance of the RAMSES system and its round-the-clock operation, reliability became the most important factor in the communication system. The error handling and diagnostics of the Kepware communications ensures the overall data integrity and reliability of the system.

It’s estimated that by the conclusion of the RAMSES project in the spring of 2009, CERN will have gained significant regulatory compliance, safety and administrative efficiencies by creating one centralized monitoring system.