Speaker
Description
At the SPES radioactive ion beam facility (INFN Legnaro National Laboratories), the Target Ion Source unit requires periodic replacement under radiological conditions precluding personnel presence. The operation is entrusted to a dedicated Remote Handling framework: an automated guided vehicle for transfer within the target area and a cartesian manipulator serving a shielded decay rack of 54 positions. Both are designed for fault tolerance, with redundant actuation and sensing, under a distributed control architecture whose safety functions are certified up to SIL 3.
Commissioning such a framework raises the question of how much endurance testing qualification requires. The approach presented derives a reliability target per mission from the foreseen operating profile, fewer than ten replacements per year with recovery delayed by radioactive decay, and converts it into the number of test missions required at stated confidence. During cold commissioning, the campaign dimensioned on this basis is structured on two levels: repeated transfers across all storage positions, providing the statistical basis, and fewer complete transfer missions, exercising the entire replacement chain and its interfaces. Given the infrequent demand, deliberate standstill periods expose dormant failures and size the periodic exercise programme foreseen for operation. Test data are archived in the open source EPICS platform.
Because the campaign compresses duty cycles but not calendar time, the parametric signatures recorded form the pre-irradiation baseline against which the effects of accumulated dose will be assessed in operation.