Green-ILC - Articles

Future Colliders: Amazing Power Efficiency Progress

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:40:27 +0100

One of the take-home messages from the last LCWS 2017 (International Workshop on Future Linear Colliders), held in Strasbourg (Oct. 23-27, 2017) is the amazing progress made towards reducing colliders energy consumption.

ILC, CLIC, material science and technology experts reported on expected great saving in the short to medium terms on the main accelerating components. As mentioned in an introduction talk (IN2P3-KEK D. Perret-Gallix), these progresses were fueled mainly by:

National or international regulations: Enforcement or incentive from new environmental regulations or recommendations (e.g. European 20-20-20 package or the US Site Sustainability Plan) are pushing laboratories and large research infrastructures towards environmental and energy sustainability aware approaches.
Social acceptance: With LHC (~ 180 MW) running, CERN uses 1.35 TWh/y, roughly the equivalent consumption of 300.000 UK home. Besides ILC (1 TeV), all new future colliders are breaking the socially acceptable glass ceiling informally set at 300 MW for a basic research infrastructure.
Energy consumption realism: Furthermore, when energy consumption reaches the level of a nuclear reactor production like some of the proposed projects, it becomes unrealistic in term of capital investment, management and social acceptance.
Capital and running cost saving: The capital cost is directly related to the length of the tunnel housing the accelerating structures. If the accelerating voltage by unit length (or gradient) is increased, the number of accelerating cells is reduced as well as the tunnel total length and therefore the overall cost.
As far as the running cost is concerned, due to the high and rising price of electricity, the yearly electricity bill becomes outrageously large yielding up to 14% of the average capital cost per year of running (ILC in Japan). Reducing the power consumption is a must.

Today, energy consumption is becoming a show stopper for some of the future projects, although the concern is not really new. All along the accelerator development history, accelerator physicists and engineers have been tackling this limitation by inventing new paradigms: circular instead of linear machines, colliders instead of fixed target experiments, superconducting instead of normal conducting (magnets and cavities), etc…

More recently, in neutron physics, ESS has been pioneering the 3R concept: responsible, renewable, recycle. As often mentioned in this blog (here) the European Spallation Source laboratory in Lund (Sweden) is currently implementing a zero carbon operation using wind energy and recycling heat wastes to local industries and households.

It is now clear that the future of accelerator physics heavily relies on solving the energy consumption issue. All efforts are now directed to the following targets: improvement of the component efficiency, energy consumption aware operation, energy recovery, recycling and storage as well as the incorporation of renewable energies in the global mix.

On the first item, namely energy saving, remarkable and encouraging progresses have been presented at LCWS 2017, mainly on the following components:

Klystrons (RF)

The driving RF power provided by the klystron tubes takes the lead in the linac electrical power inventory. Increasing klystron power efficiency has a major impact on the global collider energy consumption. A klystron is actually a small electron accelerator where the electron beam is bunched by the input low power RF signal delivering a high power microwave when reaching the output or catcher cavity.

High efficiency bunching techniques such as the “Core Oscillations Method” (COM) may lead to an efficiency increase from 45% up to 60% and maybe 70% (CERN/SLAC W. Wuench) and, although not presented at LCWS, the Kladistron embedding more intermediate bunching cavities may increase the efficiency from 50% to 60% (CEA Thales under EUCARD2, e.g see here)
Saving energy by recycling the spent electron beam power using depressed collectors. This power recovery could increase the efficiency to 75-80% and reduce the water cooling needs (CERN/SLAC W.Wuench).
Going from normal to superconducting for the solenoid surrounding the klystron tube could reduce by 90% the magnet consumption inducing, for example, a reduction of 80 MW on the CLIC power inventory (CERN-KEK, A. Yamamoto)

Superconducting Cavities (SCC)

The RF cavities fed by the klystrons are resonating elements which transfer the microwave power to the beam.

Nitrogen infusion and doping: A year ago or so, Fermilab has shown that nitrogen infusion at high temperature in the last stage of the cavity surface treatment, increases by a factor 2 the quality factor Q₀. As Q₀ is inversely proportional to the remaining surface resistance of the SCC, the generated heat is proportionally reduced and, therefore, the cryogenic power needed. In addition higher gradient, namely the accelerating “power” by unit length (MV/m) is also increased (Fermilab, M. Martinello) This breakthrough sparkled many R&D efforts. Some with on-going mixed results calling for bringing special care to the baking process:
1. DESY, (M. Wenskat)
2. KEK, Infusion/doping (K. Umemory)
3. IHEP, Infusion/doping, (J. Zhai)
4. JLAB, (P. Dhakal)
Nb3Sn coating: Compared to Nb, Nb₃Sn has a higher critical temperature which means lower heat losses (Q₀ is 20 times larger than for Nb at 4.2K) and a higher superheating field which could translates into a higher gradient ( up to 90 MV/m for a “perfect” surface and no grain boundaries issues) (Cornell, R. Porter). In comparison, the ILC is based on a cavity gradient of 31.5 MV/m, showing there is a lot of room for improvement and cost reduction. However the R&D is in a very early stage and many issues must be solved.
Magnetic shielding will reduce the pinning flux in the SC and therefore, again, the surface resistance (ICR Kyoto Y. Iwashita) see also former studies at CEA by O. Napoly at AWLC)
Insulating layer: Another approach is to introduce a thin insulating layer between the bulk Nb and a surface NbN layer to block avalanches which prevent reaching higher gradients. Local magnetometry on a sample shows that a doubling the gradient could be achieved on the ILC cavities (CEA C. Antoine). However reaching the same level of improvement on a full-fledge cavity is not given and more studies and investment are needed.

Permanent magnets

Even linear colliders have lots of magnets: quadrupoles to focus the beam all along the linac or bending magnets, (dipoles) in particular in the damping rings (where the beam bunches are shaped before acceleration). In the CLIC project their consumption amount to 124 MW, 21% of the total CLIC expected consumption at 3 TeV. The CLIC design group has launched a dedicated R&D to replace the electromagnets by adjustable permanent magnets (Superconducting magnets would have imposed the addition of a cryogenic plant only for this purpose as the whole CLIC project is non superconducting) (CERN S. Stapnes). Prototypes are being tested.

Local Saving and Recycling for ILC (Green-ILC)

Reducing the losses in the large power line electrical transformers and using local renewable energy have been studied on the Tohoku site studies (KEK T. Saeki).
Recycling heat wastes and local energy availability have also been reported. (Tohoku Iwate, M. Yoshioka).

Since the TESLA project, 16 years ago at DESY, for a long time, not much progress has been made on the SCC linac performances or efficiency. The TESLA design was considered as the state of the art, difficult to beat. But since the ILC proposal is now entering the actual implementation stage and based on lessons learned from the construction of the free electron laser XFEL in DESY (a scaled down version of the ILC linac), new R&D have been launched producing today exciting results. They are expected to lead to large saving both in capital and running cost paving the way to reaching even higher energies.

It should be noted that the SCRF R&D would be dramatically boosted would a green-light be given to the ILC project. Beyond the big impact to the project it-self, it would directly benefit the industrial and medical accelerator sector (an currently estimated park of ~30000 equipments in the world). Similarly low consumption klystrons are paramount for satellite communications, mobile radars, energy transmission and defense.

Tesla Gigafactory Power Supply: Almost Half ILC Needs

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 15:54:37 +0100

Tesla and Panasonic are investing $5 billion in the world wide largest battery factory (actually the biggest factory of any kind): the Gigafactory. When finished, in a couple of years, it will offer ~1/2 million m2 of working space under a single roof covered by solar panels. The batteries are meant to equip the 500,000 cars Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, intends to produce every year. January 4th, 2017, the first 30% of the factory was inaugurated and the battery production started.

The gigafactory will be a sustainable zero emission factory. 70 MW of power will be generated by the largest solar panels rooftop ever built plus additional ground panels. The heat waste produced by the batteries will be recycled in the building heating system.

The Gigafactory shows that, even profit-driven industry, can benefit from renewable energies.
The 500 GeV ILC with a wall-plug power of 164 MW would require “only” 2.3 gigafactories electricity production to be fully operational (well… as long as solar exposures in Kitakami¹ and the Nevada desert are similar !).

Sustainability:
GigaFactory 1 is an all-electric factory with no fossil fuels (natural gas or petroleum) directly consumed. We will be using 100% sustainable energy through a combination of a 70 MW solar rooftop array and solar ground installations. The solar rooftop array is ~7x larger than the largest rooftop solar system installed today. All-electric allows for greater efficiency in the factory itself along with zero carbon emissions.
A large portion of building heating is provided by waste heat recovered from production processes. Gigafactory’s closed-loop water supply system uses six different treatment systems to efficiently re-circulate about 1.5 million liters of water, representing an 80% reduction in fresh water usage compared with standard processes. Construction is underway for an on-site recycling facility that will safely reprocess all types of Tesla battery cells, modules, and packs, into various metal products for reuse in new cells

Quote from “Tesla Gigafactory 1 Investor Event January 4, 2017 Tahoe Reno Industrial Center – Sparks”, the full document is available from Electrek:
Tesla Gigafactory 1 Investor Event (January 4, 2017) Tahoe

¹ Kitakami Japan, north of Tokyo in Iwate prefecture proposed ILC site.

ICFA: A New Panel on Sustainable Accelerators-Colliders

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 20:45:31 +0100

ICFA (International Committee on Future Accelerators) has created a new panel looking after the energy consumption and sustainablility of accelerators and colliders.

The panel on Sustainable Accelerator and colliders have the following mandate:

Assess and promote developments on energy efficient and sustainable accelerator concepts, technologies and strategies for operation. The panel will formulate recommendations on R&D and support ICFA with networking across the laboratories and communications. The membership will ensure a broad regional participation and coverage of accelerator technologies and concepts, relevant in the context of energy consumption.

Energy consumption being a serious limiting factor in the run to the highest energies, this decision gives hope that more efforts will be dedicated to improve accelerator efficiency. Beyond the strong impact this may have on HEP projects, it may prove to make industrial/medical accelerators cheaper to run.

Green Particle Physics at the IEEE Conference

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 17:54:45 +0100

At the recent IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference (IEEE NSS/MIC 2016) held in Strasbourg (Oct. 29 to Nov. 5), a special session was dedicated to the particle accelerators energy consumption issues. The “Green Particle Physics” session included talks related to ILC, ESS and from companies such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industry, Kyocera, and Fujikura. The slides of the Green-ILC group are available from the Green-ILC website or here and here

The round table showed a close proximity between the ESS and Green-ILC projects on energy consumption issues.

CLIC Trimming Energy Consumption

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 12:50:27 +0100

The CLIC (Compact Linear International Collider) held its yearly workshop (Jan. 18-22 2016) at CERN (timetable). Its scope was clearly set:

The CLIC workshop 2016 covers Accelerator as well as the Detector and Physics studies, with its present status and program for the coming years.

Some talks were covering the CLIC electrical power consumption (272 MW) which is 65% larger than ILC at 500 GeV (164 MW). The CLIC teams have made important efforts to decrease the wall-plug AC power figures by increasing the klystron efficiency and zeroing the NC magnets consumption through the use of permanent magnet. These achievements were quite impressive.

Klystrons

Igor Syratchev (CERN) presented the “Summary of the high-efficiency day”. Klystron efficiency has become a very active topic. 13 talks were presented by researchers and companies. His encouraging conclusions were as follows:

- The High Efficiency International Klystron Activity (HEIKA) has matured and became now a truly international and efficient team of experts.
- We had a lot of progress during last year and gained much more confidence that beam based RF power amplifiers can be as efficient as 90%.
- Our progress is a good example that close collaboration between Labs and industry from the very start is a very efficient way to proceed

The design klystron efficiency has been set to 70%, achieving 90% would be a tremendous success. It would lead to a saving of roughly 20 MW at 500 GeV CM energy.

Magnets

The current CLIC design assumes using normal conducting magnet technology:
- The Drive Beam Quadrupoles (13 MW nominal, 34 MW max)
- The Drive Beam Turn Around Loop Dipoles (12.5 MW nominal)
- The Main Beam Ring to Main Linac Dipoles (2.5 MW nominal)

Using permanent magnets instead of normal conducting magnets would induce a nominal saving of 28 MW, a 10% gain over the total CLIC consumption.

Jim Clarke (STFC, UK) in his talk on Permanent magnets with adjustable strength showed that only 2 designs were necessary to cover the needs for the 45000 quadrupoles (3 TeV). There were actually tunable by moving the permanent magnet close or far away from the fixed poles with a motor. Prototypes were build and tested. Dipole magnet studies have also been started and prototypes are being prepared.

CLIC 380 GeV stage

Following the discovery of the/a Higgs at ~125 GeV, the CLIC community decided to explore the possibility for a 380 GeV machine to cover both the detailed Higgs and top physics (re-baselining) Eva Sicking (LAPP/CERN) addressed this topic on her talk “Presentation/discussion on the CLIC re-baselining document”

The study for a 11 km long first stage CLIC is still on progress but the first conclusions are:

CLIC re-baselining document close to final
- Focus on initial energy stage at 380 GeV
- 380 GeV cost: 6.7 BCHF(2010)
- power: 252 MW
- Optimal accelerator structures close to CDR design "CLIC_G"

Green-ILC Report Published

Tue, 09 Feb 2016 15:33:01 +0100

The Technical Group of the Advanced Accelerator Association Promoting Science and Technology (AAA) has set up the Green ILC working group (G-ILC) with the fact-finding mission to bring energy-saving technologies to the ILC.

The G-ILC working-group has organized in 2014/2015 many meetings gathering industry representatives and scientists. The Green-ILC Report (2014/2015) is the collection of the various talks presented during these meetings.

- Green-ILC AAA 2016 full report (100 MB)
By Chapter:
- Contents and Introduction (.3MB)
- Green Technologie trends and application to accelerators (21 MB)
- Energy saving Technologies for accelerators (25 MB)
- Energy Recovery, Energy storage, Energy Managment(29 MB)
- Renewable Energies for accelerators (36 MB)

SESAME Needs Sun to Grow

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 21:17:58 +0200

SESAME which stands for “Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and applications in the Middle East” is

a “third-generation” synchrotron light source under construction in Allan (Jordan). It will be the Middle East's first major international research centre.

Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, Director of Energy Research Oxford, President of the SESAME Council and former Director General of CERN has presented a series of very well documented seminars entitled The Outlook for Energy Supply and Demand at CERN mid September 2015. In the Q&A, he did mention that the SESAME project faces a serious running cost issue due to a very high electricity price in Allan. Grid alternative like solar power plant to cover the energy needs for this emblematic project are currently being considered. SESAME

is a cooperative venture by scientists and governments of the region set up on the model of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). It is being developed under the auspices of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) following the formal approval given for this by the Organization's Executive Board (164th session, May 2002).

Apple Inc. and Others: Renewable Energy, a Good Deal

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 10:59:36 +0100

Many wall-street companies are investing on renewable energy. Tim Cook, Apple Inc. CEO was recently reported by BloombergBusiness saying:

Apple isn't investing in solar as a gift to humanity. It's doing it because it's a good business deal, Cook stressed at the Goldman Sachs conference. "We expect to have very significant savings."

and with Apple many other companies are investing in renewable energy because it is more profitable.
If investing in renewable energies is profitable for companies and their stockholders, that should also be profitable for ILC and for other Knowledge factories.

Apple project blueprint:

Cost: $850 million
Power: Apple will get 130 megawatts, enough to power 60,000 California homes
Location: First Solar’s California Flats Solar Project in Monterey County
Contract duration: 25 years
Footprint: 2,900 acres (12 square kilometers)
Start date: Middle of this year
Completion: End of 2016 (in time to take advantage of a 30 percent U.S. tax credit)
Profitable? Yes, for both, although Apple and First Solar didn’t disclose the deal's full terms

The report continues as follows:

As if to underline that fact, within minutes of announcing the solar deal, Apple's stock ended the trading day with a record valuation of $711 billion, making it the first U.S. company to cross the $700 billion mark. Shares of both Apple and First Solar surged.
Follow the Leaders
Google: Last year Google signed a 400 Mw power-purchase deal in wind, bringing its total to 1 gigawatt.
Microsoft: In the past two years, Microsoft has entered into deals for 285 Mw of wind, including one of the world's biggest contracts for a single facility.
Amazon: Just last month, Amazon jumped into the race, signing a 150 Mw wind agreement.
Ikea: In September, Ikea and a group of large companies committed to becoming 100 percent renewable by 2020. The furniture retailer already gets a significant amount of its power through company-owned wind projects worldwide.
Wal-Mart: The big-box retailer has been busy putting panels on the tops of its big boxes, with more than 100 Mw of capacity installed.

Other famous companies taking renewable energies as serious profitable investment include:

Toyota

A large-scale embedded solar array will be switched on at Toyota UK’s engine production centre at Deeside in North Wales.
Almost 13,000 solar panels will provide up to 10% of all the electricity required for manufacturing at the site, which makes petrol and hybrid engines for Toyota Avensis and Auris models sold throughout Europe.
The solar array, commissioned as a multi-million-pound project delivered by British Gas, will significantly reduce the site’s carbon emissions. It took three months to install the panels, supplied by Tata Power Solar, which cover an area that’s the equivalent of almost eight football pitches.
The facility can generate up to 3,475,000 kWh of electricity each year – enough to produce up to 22,500 car engines. The Toyota plant’s carbon emissions will fall by 1,800 tonnes a year, a figure matching the combined weight of 1,260 Auris hatchbacks."

Honda

The 1.6-megawatt General Electric Co. turbines went into operation today at the Russells Point, Ohio, auto factory, according to a statement. ConEdison Solutions owns and operates them and Honda is buying the electricity under a long-term contract."

Renault

Together, Renault and Gestamp Solar will use solar panels to cover a total area of 450,000 m², which is equivalent to 63 football fields. The Renault factories receiving solar panels are those in Douai, Flins, Maubeuge, Batilly, Sandouville and Cléon. The areas covered by solar panels will be staff parking lots at Maubeuge and Cléon, and roofs of delivery and shipping centers at Douai, Maubeuge, Flins, Batilly and Sandouville.
The solar project will have an installed power capacity of 60 megawatts, which could power a town with a population of 15,000 annually. By switching to these solar panels, CO2 emissions will be cut by 30,000 tonnes per year.
"This solar panel project is part of the Renault 2016 - Drive The Change plan, which aims to reduce carbon emissions by 10 percent by 2013 and an additional 10 percent between 2013 and 2016. To do this, Renault is partnering with Gestamp Solar, which is a multinational corporation specializing in renewable energy, steel and automotive assembly. The idea is to install solar panels at manufacturing plants throughout France.

See more here

Elon Musk’s Gigafactory

Tesla recently announced that its Gigafactory, which will produce electric car batteries, will be located near Reno Nevada. ... In his press conference, Elon Musk stated that the factory will produce all of its own energy using a combination of solar, wind, and geothermal.

Aluminium producers

Producing alumimium is a heavy electricity consuming process . National Aluminium Company Limited (NALCO), an Indian company is now turning to renewable energy

The latest public sector company to join the renewable energy bandwagon is National Aluminium Company Limited (NALCO). The company, one of the largest aluminium production companies in the world, has announced fresh plans to install a 100 MW wind energy project, and is scouting land for the same. The new project would require an investment of Rs 660 crore ($110 million US).

Drop a link for more examples …

ESS: Agreements Could Bring Considerable Energy Savings

Wed, 25 Feb 2015 10:45:28 +0100

Overview of the planned research facility European Spallation Source as well as Science Village Scandinavia and the synchrotron facility MAX IV Laboratory.

The European Spallation Source (ESS) project is pioneering in the domain of sustainable high intensity proton linac. In January 20, 2015, it was announced that two agreements have been signed in Sept 2014 with the expectation of 10-20% energy saving.

One of the agreements was signed with a consortium consisting of Thales Industries^ and the American company Communications & Power Industries (CPI^) and the other with the provider of communication and electronic systems and products (L3^). If proven to work, the new technology could mean substantial, (million EUR-level), energy savings for the research facility and be a game-changer for the RF industry.

Thales Industries
L3
CPI

The cooperation agreement comprises the re-development of an old technology, i.e. IOT (Inductive Output Tube) to a potentially strong competitor to the currently developing technology such as the solid state (transistor) alternative. The development of pyrolytic graphite grid technology and the “on-the-shelf” availability of powerful solid-state RF amplifiers as pre-amplifiers are making the IOT of today a viable and advantageous alternative to the more traditional klystron technology.
Prototype development is underway. The production will begin in 2016, with delivery to CERN for testing in 2017 and early production of units delivered to ESS by 2019.

ILC Inspires Innovation

Mon, 09 Feb 2015 11:07:57 +0100

The power consumption of particle accelerators and colliders has become a serious issue. Delivering larger beam energy or beam intensity implies using larger electrical power. The yearly consumption of CERN when the high energy research collider LHC is running reaches figure similar to a city of 250-300,000 people.

The future of accelerator physics, both for the high energy and the high intensity sectors, is at stake. Most researchers assume that the power “glass ceiling” is at the level of 300 MW, which will be nearly reached after the high luminosity LHC upgrade. Beyond that, the social, the financial and, even, the technological acceptance is questionable.
But, instead of being a road blocker, this challenge will lead to innovations. Implementing energy saving, recovery and recycling technologies as well as the injection of locally produced sustainable energies and their necessary storage for a large research infrastructure, is a major and unique opportunity to contribute to the energy R&D and to the energy future of the society. Many innovations generated by this highly demanding frontier research will find applications in the medical and industrial accelerator sector evaluated to 30-40000 units in the world.

There is a rich history of innovations born from research needs in space, bio-medical, IT or high-energy physics. But to make it happen, the scale of the project matters both in terms of human and financial investment and as a convincing oppotunity for the industry to engage heavily in R&D. Tackling the energy challenge opens doors to advanced collaborations with a flurry of industries far beyond those providing accelerator equipment as it was in the past.

The International Linear Collider, although certainly the less power hungry of the future projects, is the first to address from greenfield the energy issues. At the intensity frontier the European Spallation Source (ESS) is already proceeding in the same direction.

But, beyond energy consumption, the ILC project will have to confront other issues:

Fast and reliable transports for equipment and people over a mountainous 30-50 km long site
Surveillance and security monitoring and intervention over a large site
Beam dumps management
Air and water control and preservation
High precision alignment and mitigation of earth vibration
and much more…

But also:

Governance and management of a global research project
Urbanism and social life
ILC at the center of a global city

All these challenges may boost innovation in technology or in social/human activities and, again, many may turn out to be valuable to the society at large. Who would have thought that addressing a mere documentation problem at CERN would have been the starting point of the Web revolution?

Several initiatives have been launched to bring together researchers, engineers and industry leaders in working groups to find and work out technology and engineering solutions and more will be needed to address the social and managment issues.

Note added in proof: Sometimes ingenuity takes over high-tech innovation.
No robots !!
A ferret was kindly asked to make a round trip on the 27km LEP beam pipe to lay a wire then used to make sure the pipe was free of any leftover stuff like tools, cleaning wipe or the like. But this is an old technique known since ages.

3rd Energy for Sustainable Science Workshop

Wed, 04 Feb 2015 16:01:01 +0100

The 3rd workshop on “Energy for Sustainable Science will take place in DESY (probably Hamburg) on Oct. 29-30 2015. It was announced by Frederick Bordry, head of the CERN Accelerator and Technology dept. at the end of his talk at the January 2015 CLIC workshop.

The official conference website is now available. The first and second workshops were held in Lund (Sweden) and CERN (Switzerland) co-organized by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, ERF, the European Association of National Research Facilities, and ESS, the European Spallation Source.

Quote of the overview of the first workshop:

Volatile energy costs, a tight budget climate and increasing environmental concerns are all inciting large-scale research facilities across the globe to develop mid- and long-term strategies aimed at achieving for the future a reliable, affordable and sustainable energy supply that is carbon neutral.
The workshop will bring together international experts on energy and representatives from laboratories and future projects all over the world in order to identify the challenges and best practice in respect of energy efficiency and optimization, solutions and implementation as well as to review the challenges represented by potential future technical solutions and the tools for effective collaboration.

Topics for discussion included:
* Technical challenges in availability and quality: efficiency and optimization of energy supply, energy recovery, storage and stability
* Strategic and financial challenges for the future: impact of GRID regulation, investment optimization, procurement strategy
* Challenges for heat recycling systems and water saving: energy conversion, heat recovery, high-temperature cooling loops

KEK Supercomputer Second in the Top Green500 List

Sun, 23 Nov 2014 10:46:18 +0100

Large computing farms, supercomputers and servers are heavy electrical power consumers to the point that reducing energy consumption has become one of the main issue in CPU and system developments. The Green500 list has been created to support the efforts towards improving computing efficiency and reducing power consumption. In its last issue, the two top ranks are taken by systems for the nuclear and high-energy physics applications High-Energy Physics is heavily consuming computing resources. Accelerator designs, detectors and physics simulations, data-analysis and theoretical calculations require hundreds of Teraflops, tens of Petabytes of storage and hundreds of Gbytes/s for data transfers. The data grid concept has been precisely invented to cover LHC needs. Most of the computing load, although distributed all over the world, is based on the farm concept: one cpu one job. However, theoretical calculation on extended lattice for the non-perturbative part of quantum chromodynamics, called lattice QCD, requires massively parallel programming and run on supercomputers. It has also been shown that supercomputers “idle cycles” can be favorably scavenged providing tens of millions of cpu-hours for farm-type jobs.

But whatever the technology, big farm or supercomputers, their large energy consumption has become a real issue preventing higher performances both for technical and running cost reasons. This is why big efforts are now underway to save energy and lower the power figure of large computing equipments. The Green500 list mirroring the top500 for the fastest supercomputers has been created to monitor the progresses made on the energy consumption frontier.

The purpose of the Green500 is to provide a ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world. For decades, the notion of "performance" has been synonymous with "speed" (as measured in FLOPS, short for floating-point operations per second). This particular focus has led to the emergence of supercomputers that consume egregious amounts of electrical power and produce so much heat that extravagant cooling facilities must be constructed to ensure proper operation. Extrapolation shows that Exascale computing will need electrical power beyond current possibilities. The top Green500 most energy efficient supercomputer was created in 2007 to promote R&D in energy efficient computation.

November 14, 2014, the top Green500 list was released. Ranking first, L-CSC from GSI Helmholtz Center (Germany) for nuclear physics and second, Suiren (water lily) from KEK computing center (Japan) for particle physics

Assuming that L-CSC’s energy efficiency could be scaled linearly to an exaflop supercomputing system, one that can perform one trillion floating-point operations per second, such a system would consume on the order of 190 megawatts (MW). “Although this 190-megawatt power envelope is still far from DARPA’s optimistic target of a 67-megawatt power envelope, it is approximately 16 times better than the initial projection of a nearly 3000-megawatt power envelope from 2007 when the first official Green500 list was launched,” says Wu Feng of the Green500.

Technical data:

Green500 notes that:

The Suiren supercomputer is the first system designed with custom accelerators to enter the top five since November of 2010, when the GRAPE-DR supercomputer achieved the same feat.
The PEZY-SC many-core accelerators in the Suiren supercomputer each contain 1,024 processing elements that use a pair of ARM926 cores as controller cores. This is the first such system on the Green500 that features many-core technology from a manufacturer other than AMD, Intel, or NVIDIA

Green-ILC in LC Newsline

Tue, 11 Nov 2014 12:22:59 +0100

The “Green ILC: Towards sustainable colliders” is presented by Barbara Warmbein in the last issue of the LC newsline newsletter (Oct. 30, 2014). The LC newsline is the newsletter of the Linear Collider Collaboration (LLC).

New Hydraulic Wind Turbine

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 02:51:28 +0100

In January 2013, test operations of an innovative wind power generation facility with a hydraulic drive train began at MHI Yokohama Dockyard & Machinery Works.
The adoption of wind power has skyrocketed in recent years due to global demands for renewable energy, and MHI has now developed the world's first hydraulic drive train to use Digital Displacement® Transmission (DDT*) technology. The product was created during the development of a new hydraulic drive train system for offshore wind turbines, a project which began in September 2011 with support from the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). This operation testing will accelerate the realization of the world's largest 7 megawatt-class wind power generation facility.
(*) Digital Displacement® Transmission is a registered trademark of MHI.

An in-depth discussion of the hydraulic drive is available in the “hydaulics \& pneumatics” website Hydrostatic Transmissions: A Power Play in Wind Turbine Design

Key points are discussed here:
- A nacelle-mounted hydraulic drivetrain could be thousands of pounds lighter than the mechanical gearboxes used today.
- Today’s off-the-shelf hydraulic components are practical for wind turbines with outputs up to about 500 kW.
- Hydraulic drivetrains would decouple torsional vibrations generated in the rotor hub from the generator and boost reliability in the bargain.

Resources: Eaton Corp., wind turbine hydraulics info

Several wind turbines could generate power to a single gound level electricity generator:

Note that the electricity generator could be switch off when no demand and replaced by an air compressor/liquefier. LN2 could be stored on site and vaporized when needed in a hydraulic turbine powering the electrical generator.

Green Session at LCWS 2014

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 03:40:09 +0100

The Green-ILC project as well as other initiatives at the ESS, CLIC and others are meant to be merged in a more global endeavor beyond projects and frontiers, because the energy consumption challenge is quite universal.
The first joint meeting actually started, at the last LCWS2014 (International workshop on future Linear Colliders) in Belgrade (Oct. 2014) and at HF2014 (55th ICFA Advanced Beam Dynamics Workshop on High Luminosity Circular e+e- Colliders – Higgs Factory). A common session the “green session” was organized and 5 talks were presented. (see here and here (Thursday Oct 9 at 18:) as well as the summary talks (here and here).

EUCARD2 EnEfficient

Sat, 20 Sep 2014 15:24:03 +0200

EUCARD2 is a European granted accelerator R%D network program with many working groups each related to future accelerator development issues. One of these the WG 3: ENEfficicient is for Energy Efficiency. A workshop has been organized on June 3-4 2014. Many interesting talks are available here. The introduction was as follows:

Today particle accelerators have a broad range of applications in fundamental science, medicine and industry. In the past the achievement of performance goals such as beam energy, beam power or other qualifying beam parameters were the primary objectives for accelerator development. With the advanced technologies available today it is often well known how such goals can be achieved, and now the efficient and cost effective utilization of electrical power gets increasingly into focus. For accelerators with high beam power the conversion efficiency from grid to beam is of utmost importance, e.g. ESS, ILC, CLIC, LHeC. Conventional state of the art RF sources cannot reach the efficiency targets set by these future colliders.

There is currently significant research effort into the studying the efficiency of conventional power sources and the exploration of new devices and concepts, e.g. multi-beam IOT’s with solid state driver; magnetrons with better stability. Within the network EnEfficient the aim of this two day workshop is to address several topics related to the energy efficiency of high power RF sources and to stimulate advances and innovations in this field. The workshop will cover advances and experience primarily in Klystrons, IOTs, Magnetrons, Tetrodes and high power SSA systems.

Liquid Air in the Energy and Transport Systems

Sun, 14 Sep 2014 15:27:35 +0200

The Liquid Air Energy Network (LAEN) is the new forum for the advocacy and development of liquid air as an alternative way to harness waste and surplus energy within power and transport.
- Liquid air is a novel, energy storage solution that could play a key role in the low carbon energy future.
- The UK has world class expertise in both mechanical engineering and cryogenics.
The use of liquid air for grid-based energy storage could increase energy security, cut greenhouse gas emissions and create a new industry for the UK worth at least £1bn pa and 22,000 jobs to the UK. Liquid air technologies could also significantly increase the efficiency of road vehicles, particularly in commercial buses, vans and refrigerated lorry fleets.

HEP or NP Accelerators nowadays are all using superconducting cavities and magnets. In the old-time Liquid nitrogen was a necessary first step to cool down the large accelerator mass. LHC is not using liquid nitrogen and relies on cryocoolers based helium. ILC is planned to follow the same approach. Reintroducing liquid nitrogen as a first stage in cooling down the whole equipment would reduce dramatically the energy consuption to the expense of the increased complexity of handling an additional fluid which in certain loaction could be hazardous

It remains that liquid nitrogen which is a basic fluid in accelerator systems can also be the energy storage of choice in the attempt to build green accelerators (see the report on energy and transport)

CEA Liten

Sun, 14 Sep 2014 11:49:39 +0200

Liten (Laboratory for Innovation in New Energy Technologies and Nanomaterials) is an institute forming part of the CEA's Technological Research Division. It is one of Europe's leading research centres in the new energy technology field.

It is worth noting the Liten presentation in Japanese.

Mega Solar Plant in Japan

Tue, 26 Aug 2014 15:16:20 +0200

From SolarServer

Marubeni puts online Japan's largest solar PV plant at 82 MW
The Oita PV plant sits in an industrial part of Oita City, on the edge of the Suo Channel. Image: Marubeni
Marubeni Corp. (Tokyo) has held an opening ceremony for a 82 MW solar photovoltaic (PV) plant which it has commissioned in Southern Japan's Ōita Prefecture. This is the largest PV plant completed in Japan to date.
Marubeni began commercial operation of the Oita plant on March 12th, 2014, fifty days ahead of schedule, and began construction on the project in March 2013. Electricity from the plant is being sold to Kyushu Electric Power Co. Inc. (Fukuoka, Japan) under a 20-year contract.

Ivanpah: World Largest Solar Plant

Tue, 26 Aug 2014 14:54:59 +0200

The time has come to witness the largest solar thermal project in the world
With our parent company NRG Energy, Inc., along with Google, BrightSource Energy and other investors, we have built the largest solar thermal project in the world, which was completed in early 2014. Located near Ivanpah, Calif., in the Mojave Desert, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System generates nearly 400 MW of electricity — nearly double the amount of commercial solar thermal energy now generated in the United States. Because of this, POWER Magazine crowned it the Plant of the Year, the highest honor.

However not quite environment friendly: The world’s largest solar thermal power plant is incinerating thousands of local birds

ESS Gets the Green Light

Tue, 26 Aug 2014 14:19:58 +0200

The European Spallation Source has received approval to start construction. The project will break ground in Lund in the early autumn. Experts all over Europe are prepared to build one of the world's most powerful instruments for using neutrons to study nature’s building blocks.

A green light to maybe the first green accelerator. But is this the baseline ?

The Site Is Now Open

Wed, 06 Aug 2014 20:32:10 +0200

A first version of the Green-ILC site is now open. It will evolve with the needs. It is supposed to cover all energy issues related to the ILC, but also to any future accelerators. It is a forum open to all participants to the projects, in particular: HEP and accelerators physicists, industry researchers and decisions makers.