Growing demands on accelerator performance, together with recent advances in computational sciences, provide a remarkable opportunity to rethink how CERN’s accelerator complex is operated. Moving beyond traditional approaches, greater automation and improved optimisation methods promise measurable benefits, including reduced costs and energy use, shorter setup times, consistent beam quality, and higher overall reliability. Delivering these gains requires, among others, new algorithms, ranging from classical optimisation to m...

How much time do equipment experts and piquets spend on remote and local interventions? Is there sufficient data available across the groups to do this analysis? What kind of data exists across the groups (what is logged?) and what would be needed in addition to extend the analysis? Can we quantify the potential gain from automating remote interventions? Can we differentiate between simple local interventions and more complex ones? Can this information be included in AFT or any other centralised tracking tool? What stan...

Electrolytic capacitors are among the most vulnerable components in power electronic converters, risking their efficient and electrically stable operation. This is due to the decreasing capacitance under long-term stress. Thus, monitoring of the capacitance is imperative for ensuring proper converter's operation. This paper proposes a low-invasive method for condition monitoring of the health-status of DC-link electrolytic capacitors. The proposed method is based on the estimation of the remaining capacitance by analyzing th...

Using modularized power converters with scalable energy storage in particle accelerators can be further enhanced with controls that can be adapted to optimise different design targets, such as to minimise the front-end stage peak current, the depth of discharge of electrolytic capacitors or the thermal cycling of semiconductors. This paper proposes a control system that is able to individually adjust the power flow of the converter modules under pre-defined load profiles, and hence separates the use of energy storage and gri...

This paper presents a new method for condition monitoring of solder layer degradation of liquid-cooled power semiconductors. Solder layer degradation is detected by an increased thermal impedance, which has the effect that more heat is dissipated into the air instead of the cooling liquid. The proposed condition monitoring method is based on detecting the share of heat dissipated to the liquid and to the air. Experimental validation in a down-scaled laboratory setup is presented, with the focus for an application in an indus...