One more issue has been observed concerning the local damper of PR vertical mode at 11.6 Hz, in addition to the permanent excitation due to the noisy sensor. As shown in fig 1, sometimes a fast glitch affects the sensor, inducing a strong reaction of the loop. The effect on PRCL is large and sometimes in can determine a lock loss (fig 2).
After the successful attempt to open the damper in a stable lock, reported in the previous entry, an attempt to acquire the lock keeping the damper always off was performed, but again the bouncing mode appeared to be unstable during some phase of the lock acquisition (fig 3).
Yesterday we decided to implement the correct strategy, profiting of the maintenance. In CARM NULL a much better sensor of PR vertical motion is available: this is the quadrant used to control the beam jitter. It has been used in the past to slowly control PR vertical position and it is still named 'ASC_PR_Y_INPUT'. Its signal to noise ratio at the resonance is about a factor of 1000 higher and the response to the actuation has the same shape. It was already available in PR DSP and it was just matter to implement a logic able to swap from the local sensor to the quadrant as soon as the second one is ready for the use. It happens at the beginning of CARM NULL and the switch already used to close the beam jitter control can be used also for the swap of the damper.
The implementation was quite straightforward, but the first attemp to use it after the maintenance failed because of a stupid error. In the following locks it worked fine and the advantages are quite evident (fig 4, 5, 6, 7).