Design of an Automatic System for the Electrical Quality Assurance during the Assembly of the Electrical Circuits of the LHC

A method has been developed to verify automatically in the LHC tunnel the correct wiring of the 1712 circuits with about 70000 splices for the powering of all-together 10094 magnet units in the LHC machine. The test equipment first detects the continuity of a part of the electrical circuit and then verifies the polarity and type of the magnets connected in the circuit. A 108-meter LHC cell is the shortest unit that can be tested. The mobile system is composed of a unit placed at the centre of the cell and two de-multiplexers positioned at the extremities of the cell. The central unit contains a data acquisition system with a high precision digital multi-meter (DMM), switching matrixes and digital I/O ports to drive the de-multiplexers. In total 217 signals can be acquired and 3160 voltage combinations are possible. Pointing to different databases, a LabVIEW program automatically executes the test procedure and then generates and stores the reports. The hardware and software design, the data flow between databases, and the testing methodology applied to the different circuit types are described.