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AdV-MAN (Environmental noise studies)
fiori, swinkels - 12:07 Friday 20 July 2012 (30827) Print this report
14Hz magnetic noise

Figure 1 compares magnetic noise in the central building during VSR4 and now when most devices are off. Despite the significant reduction of noise. Yet a few intense bump structures remains apparently unchanged: the first at 14Hz and then as +-14Hz sidebands of 50Hz and multiples. The same magnetic noise is  also present at WE and NE (Figure 2 is for WE). also the frequency is very stable with time (Figure 3). The origin is not understood. Some coherence is found with IPS probes (Figure 4), but the intensity is very low, which might indicate this is the effect of  some magnetic noise pick-up of the IPS sniffer probes.

The 14Hz frequency roughly corresponds to the frequency of one of the Schumann's EM resonances of Earth's ionosphere. However this seems not the case: the noise seems not present in the outdoor magnetic spectra we took in two occasions: near CB with the flux-gate magnetometer, and at further distances with the same MFS-06 low noise magnetometer in use inside buildings. Also note, noise peaks are NOT coherent among distant magnetometers, like NE and WE (Figure 4).

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Paoletti - 14:03 Friday 20 July 2012 (30828) Print this report
According to literature the amplitude of the Schumann magnetic field lies around 1pT, that is one order of magnitude BELOW what is measured at 14 Hz in the Virgo buildings.
This should confirm that these uncorrelated 14Hz signals are not Schumann's resonances.
These +-14Hz sidebands of 50Hz and multiples lead me thinking at some machine connected to the IPS mains still running somewhere.
swinkels - 11:45 Monday 23 July 2012 (30830) Print this report
Similar sidebands around the 50 Hz line were seen in the past on the monitor of the modulation index Bs_Mod_6Mhz, which then couples as amplitude modulation noise to the dark fringe. In that case, however, the frequency of the bumps was 50 +- 18 Hz. I don't know if this is the same noise source that drifted in frequency, or a similar but separate problem. Possible sources might indeed be some heavy machine that could modulate the 50 Hz line.
swinkels - 18:20 Monday 23 July 2012 (30832) Print this report
Browsing a bit in the spectrogram archives, the lines can be seen jumping or disappearing every now and then, see attached images. Looking in the logbook around those times, I cannot find anything obvious, although some work on the UPS was mentioned by the operator on at least 2 occasions. One of the jumps occurs on a Saturday, which might indicate some failure or some change done by ENEL. The lines first appear between March and May 2010, when the spectrograms are missing. It would be nice if we can recover such a jump in data for which raw data is still available, to see if the jump is common between buildings and other sensors (UPS, IPS, ...).
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swinkels - 11:07 Tuesday 24 July 2012 (30833) Print this report
There seems to be a perfect correlation between the jumps and some event on the UPS of the first pumping station along the north arm (N600). This can be seen in either the 'remaining backup time' (IMMS_N600_UPS_RBT) or the alarm flag (IMMS_N600_UPS_ALRM), which is zero in case of trouble. To be understood why this pumping station generates so much noise (broken UPS or pump?) and why this noise is seen in the magnetometer of the central building (via the cable that powers the UPS that runs around the central building?). To be investigated further ...
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fiori - 11:53 Tuesday 05 March 2013 (30955) Print this report

Figures below illustrate the large reduction of magnetic noise inside the NE hall, which seems correlated to the switch off  the UPS unit feeding the pumping station at 2400-North, that is 600 m away into the tunnel (see IMMS UPS monitor in Figure 3).  IPS and UPS voltage monitors in the hall see a small effect too (Figure 2).

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