Thermal study and design of a cooling system for the electronics boards of the LHCb SciFi tracker

The LHCb detector, one of the four large LHC detectors, has launched a major upgrade program with the goal to enormously boost the rate and selectivity of the data taking. The LHCb upgrade comprises the complete replacement of several sub-detectors, the substantial upgrade of the front-end electronics and the introduction of a new paradigm, namely the suppression of a hardware trigger by reading out the whole experiment synchronously at a rate of 40 MHz. The high readout frequency, unprecedented in a particle physics experiment, and the harsh radiation environment related to the increased LHC intensity, are the major challenges to be addressed by the new sub-detectors. The development and construction of a new large-scale tracking detector, based on a novel scintillating fibre (SciFi) technology, read out with silicon photomultipliers (SiPM), is one of the key projects of the LHCb upgrade program. The LHCb SciFi detector will count more than 500,000 channels. It is composed of 12 layers arranged in 3 tracking stations each with 4 planes of scintillating fiber modules and with a total sensitive area of about 340 m2. It is necessary to design an on-detector electronics allowing to readout the detector at 40MHz and to transmit the data at this frequency to the data acquisition system. The most challenging part for the FE electronics is the signal digitisation. A new front-end ASIC with 128 channels, the number of channels of a SiPM, is being developed to process and digitise the analogue signal from the SiPM. The hit position of the particle needs to be computed with a spatial resolution less than 100 μm. Four functions will be required to achieve this: amplification, shaping, integrating and digitisation. The boards hosting the ASIC and the clustering FPGAs, including the customised FPGA firmware are under design. Two front-end boards are used to read out half a SciFi module made of 2.5 m long fibre mats and are host in a Read Out Box (ROB). The power consumption of the boards in a ROB is around 120 W. In order to ensure the proper functioning of electronic components, it is mandatory to design a compact and efficient cooling system. It is worthwhile to notice that SiPM, which are connected to the electronics via flex cables, are located in the vicinity and their operating temperature must be regulated perfectly around -40° C. The first step to design the electronics cooling is to evaluate the energy balance of the electronic boards and to study the different cooling systems that may be appropriate. Once the modeling is done, the model is simulated with the FloTHERM and ANSYS softwares to find the more appropriate solution. The cooling system will be based on a demineralized water cooling system already existing in the LHCb cavern, but which will have to be redesigned to cope with the higher power consumption of the electronics, working at 19°C. Pipes going along the detector and through cooling blocks in Al or Cu will serve 5 or 6 ROB depending on the location. The electronic boards will be mounted on a radiator in Al which is screwed to two cooling blocks. The study of the cooling system has shown that it is more than necessary to integrate thermal interfaces such as thermal pastes in order to ensure a better thermal conductivity between the electronic components and the cooler. These interfaces are a delicate point of heat transfer because they can have several tens of percent of the overall thermal resistance. They therefore require a thorough knowledge of their behavior at thermal stresses, as well as their exposure to neutron and other radiation in which they will be surrounded during the operation of the experiment. In order to guarantee an adequate and durable use of these materials, several parameters have to be checked, in particular the hardness, the consistency (no grease or oil production) and the thermal conductivity. Thermal and radiation tests are therefore necessary in order to verify the resistance of the materials over the total duration considered for the detector, as well as hardness and thermal conductivity. Thermal conductivity measurement is an important and complicated part of the process. The appropriate method for measuring the thermal conductivity or thermal resistance of the interface material is based on ASTM D5470. A dedicated setup has been designed to perform these measurements. Prototypes of the different parts of the cooling system and of the electronics have been designed and built. Several tests have been conducted and the performances achieved will be presented.