Software Tools for Electrical Quality Assurance in the LHC

There are over 1600 superconducting magnet circuits in the LHC machine. Many of them consist of a large number of components electrically connected in series. This enhances the sensitivity of the whole circuits to electrical faults of individual components. Furthermore, circuits are equipped with a large number of instrumentation wires, which are exposed to accidental damage or swapping. In order to ensure safe operation, an Electrical Quality Assurance (ELQA) campaign is needed after each thermal cycle. Due to the complexity of the circuits, as well as their distant geographical distribution (tunnel of 27km circumference divided in 8 sectors), suitable software and hardware platforms had to be developed. The software combines an Oracle database, LabView data acquisition applications and PHP-based web follow-up tools. This paper describes the software used for the ELQA of the LHC.