Thermal analysis of the ambient air around a particle detector

The ATLAS particle detector will be in operation at CERN in a few years. The so-called "end cap muon chambers", which form a sub-system of this detector, need to be aligned accurately by means of light rays. Despite the significant amount of heat released in the air by the detector, the rays must not be too much distorted by temperature difference. In order to predict ambient temperature gradient, a thermal analysis is done using a CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) model. Because of the complexity of ATLAS geometry, relevant assumptions need to be made in order to get a suitable model for numerical analysis and which give reliable results at the same time.