LHC DIPOLE MAGNET SPLICE RESISTANCE FROM SM18 DATA MINING

The splice incident which happened during commissioning of the LHC on the 19th of September 2008 caused damage to several magnets and adjacent equipment. This raised not only the question of how it happened, but also about the state of all other splices. The inter magnet splices were immediately studied and new measurements recorded, but the internal magnet splices were still a concern. At the Chamonix meeting in January 2009, the CERN management decided to create a working group to analyse quench data of the magnet acceptance tests in an attempt to find indications for bad splices in the main dipoles. This resulted in a data-mining project that took about one year to complete. This presentation describes how the data was stored, extracted and analysed reusing existing LabVIEW™ based tools. We also present the encountered difficulties and the importance of combining measured data with operator notes in the logbook.