Pioneering development work

The person in charge of assembling the particle accelerators is engineer James Citadini (37). Millions of electronic and other parts are included in the three particle accelerators that together form the fourth-generation accelerator. And all of them, even those weighing tons, had to be put in place with millimetre precision. Every day for the past few years, Citadini has felt his adrenaline surge at work. “Time and again, we realised there were no ready-made solutions for certain challenges. We constantly had to invent new ones,” he recalls.

Many of the components used in Sirius were therefore built from scratch, which presented one of the biggest challenges the project team faced. “We’ve used high-field permanent magnets, for instance,” the engineer says, adding: “At the time, experts at every conference and trade fair voiced their scepticism, claiming it would never work the way we had planned – but now our model is seen as a benchmark!”

Attempts to commission exclusively Brazilian suppliers proved to be another challenge. “At times, we had to convince small companies to develop new parts especially for us that could only be tested out after they were made – and that potentially might not work,” says Citadini. Some 85 per cent of the investment in Project Sirius has stayed in Brazil. 

One of the very few exceptions are enclosures from Rittal. The Herborn-based company is the world leader for enclosures and cooling systems and has been operating in Brazil since 1996. “We wanted to house the electronic systems in compartments in the inner concrete wall,” Citadini explains. “More than 200 large enclosures are used there at the same time, right next to the research stations.” The enclosures need to be constantly cooled to the exact same temperature – as silently as possible. Their climate-control systems consist of fan-and-filter units that use the climate-controlled ambient air for cooling purposes. This is another area where the extremely quiet and fail-safe fan-and-filter units from Rittal won over the Brazilian scientists. The team also required a standardised enclosure design that could nonetheless accommodate very different components and perform extremely varied functions. “Thousands of electronic components of various sizes all need to fit into the same enclosure system,” says Citadini. Marcelo Adolfo from Rittal Brazil adds: “It’s also imperative to prevent any kind of vibration to avoid adverse effects on the researchers’ experiments. The enclosures need to run without any disruption whatsoever, too.”