Comments from the Monitoring Review held 7/24/02

D. Pushka 7-25-02


General:

I am very pleased to see the monitoring systems (muons and hadron
monitors) becoming firmly designed.  Alignment tolerances are documented
and seem reasonable (not too tight).  Detectors are designed with some
prototypes built.  All in all, this system is progressing.

Specific Comments on the Muon Monitoring:

1) Stand design appears to be getting more complicated then the initial
design developed by Dave Northacker (which I thought was still too
complex).  Specifically:

1a) Alignment tolerances do not justify the kinematic three point support.
I estimated the true fabricated costs of each kinematic support (material
and machinist labor to fabricate the material) to be between $500 and
$1000 each.  That is perhaps as much as $3k per stand, $6k total of
expense not warranted by the physics design.  Hard to justify in the
present economic state of the project.

1b) Three point support is not warranted because no tolerance on the
rotation about the beam axis was presented in the physics.  Stability
issues with having the back corner hanging out in mid air raise my
concern.  Not to mention the large amount of material hanging out in mid
air doing nothing productive.

1c)  For the small weight of the muon detectors (~ 350 pounds) I do not
understand why the stand is not designed to be fabricated out of unistrut
material, using bolted connections, four point support, shimed to set the
vertical height, and anchored to the floor for true stability.  Such a
structure could be assembled by two summer students powered by Diet Coke.



Specific Comments on the Hadron Monitoring:

2) Basic Design is still conceptual, but sound.

3) Rail to support the detector in the beam is fine, but the connection to
the concrete is too complex and doesn't offer sufficient stability in the
z direction (the direction of the proton beam).  Why the adjustment?  Not
needed if survey sets the beam elevation on the wall before you begin to
install the rail.

4) Handling of the activated detector needs more work to develop.  This is
a big job to do well and to minimize exposure.  I advocate building a
device to lift the coffin in the air and to pull the spent detector
directly into the coffin a la the Miniboone Horn.  Then lowering the
coffin and storing it in an area blessed the RSO.  I can think of no other
place on sight where material is stored in a beam dump enclosure.

This is a complicated set of dance steps:
 	Remove shielding plug
	Store activated shieding plug to that the hot end is shielded
	Disconnect cables, gas lines.
	Pull spent hadron monitor into the coffin
	Move coffin to the storage area
	Replace shielding plug

Each of these above steps probably has 5 to 10 sub-steps, so in total,
this is more complicated than the Electric Slide or just about any other
line dance in Austin.

Respectively Submitted,
Dave Pushka