Integrations of a coordinating system with conventional metrology in the setting out of magnetic lenses of nuclear accelerator

Description

Industrial metrology is a discipline of engineering surveys that require the utmost in achievable accuracies. The instrumentation used in traditional industrial metrology requires long painstaking procedure with very skilled craftsmen to obtain the required results. The introduction of electronic theodolites has changed the approach and the flexibility of industrial surveys. The development of coordinating systems, electronics theodolites interfaced to a microcomputer, provides the capabilities for on line data gathering with simultaneous processing in all three dimensions. The existing requirements for conventional metrology of having to access particular lines of sight can be neglected, without loss of accuracy and with the addition of redundancy, to obtain the coordinate solutions. In addition, groups of targets can be analysed in virtual real time by determining coefficients for a particular surface from a least squares fitting. However, the coordinating systems and the conventional techniques each have their own assets, with the integration of the two techniques into a single system allowing for the full exploitation of each’s assets. A coordinating system, precision three dimensional coordinating system (“P3DCS”), has been developed by UNB, as a by-product of a project involving the setting out of components forming a portion of a nuclear accelerator. The algorithms that have been developed and used for the software development are presented with emphasis placed on obtaining the optimal accuracies from the system. The UNB coordinating system was integrated with traditional metrology techniques in the successful completion of the setting out of Phase II of the Tandem Accelerator Superconducting Cyclotron (“TASCC”) for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (“AECL”). This phase of TASCC involved the precision three dimensional alignment of 67 magnets, both bending and focusing, to tolerances less than 0.1 mm in the transverse and 0.2 mm in the along beam line from their nominal locations.