Engineering the cooling and ventilation for the LHC

Early in the LHC-project, a decision was made to complete in-house, as much of the engineering for the new cooling and ventilation systems as was practicable. This is achieved using the competence of resident (CERN staff) engineers for the studies, project management, on-site installation, supervision, etc. The documentation has however, been compiled using the format of tender drawings in the technical office by industrial service personnel. This model, adopted by the Cooling and Ventilation (CV) group is attractive from the viewpoint of conservation of “know-how” within CERN. The main difficulty is however, to be able to absorb such an important project within available manpower. This paper will revisit the arguments behind this method as well as summarize the results to date. Finally, the author will outline other methods (followed by other groups within the project), for a comparison with the model chosen by ST/CV.