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AdV-TCS (TCS control system)
bersanetti, cabognani, cortese, dattilo, dibiase, gherardini, lumaca, melo, menzione, nardecchia - 20:54 Monday 02 March 2026 (68787) Print this report
TCS Restart After Shutdown

Today the TCS system was progressively restarted after the shutdown.

PR CHRoCC

  • Suzanne switched on the PR CHRoCC at 10:40 UTC (4.14 V, ramp time: 7200 s).

Ring Heaters 

  • In the morning, Fabio restarted the power supply of the SR RH. The SR RH was switched on at 11:04 UTC after approval from Antonio.

  • The NE and WE RHs were also unreachable. In the afternoon, Fabio went to the end buildings and was able to fix the problem. The RHs remained powered ON; only the process data were unavailable.

CO₂ Benches

Some preliminary actions were performed before switching on the lasers:

  • Vincenzo and Nicola checked the correct operation of the chiller system.

  • Suzanne opened the acoustic enclosures housing the CO₂ benches to verify that all power meters and thermal cameras were powered on. All devices were ON and appeared to be working properly.

Although the thermal cameras were powered, they were not reachable remotely. We informed the computing team, who recovered the connections.
The TCS Agilis Rot process (controlling the half-wave plates on the benches) was not running --> Franco restored the system.

After these checks, in the afternoon, at around 15:30 UTC, the entire system was switched on again (chiller + main lasers + auxiliary lasers).

An issue was observed on the NI bench: after the restart, the laser output power is approximately half of the pre-shutdown value (see Fig. 1).

Suzanne inspected the optical bench and did not notice any abnormal condition. The reduction appears to come from the laser itself, which is currently delivering about 50% of its nominal power. A possible explanation is a failure of two out of the four RF driver modules. Further investigation is needed.

 

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Comments to this report:
zaza - 10:01 Wednesday 04 March 2026 (68812) Print this report

The two smart sockets in TCS room have been giving grey flags and absence of data on DMS after the shutdown. They are responsive to pings, I tried to disconnect and re-connect the network cables and to press the reset button (A) on the side. The manual then says to use the main reset switch to turn the sockets off and back on but, since they power part of the TCS configuration, it was decided by TCS team to keep everything as it is and to fix the issue at the next shutdown of the system, which is planned in the near future. Flags will be commented until then.

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nardecchia - 21:48 Thursday 05 March 2026 (68833) Print this report

Around 18:30 UTC I was contacted by Madda due to low sideband power observed in CITF.

A check of the power levels of the different TCS actuators did not reveal any value significantly different from the nominal ones that could justify such a change in the operating point and the observed reduction of the sideband power.

I then briefly inspected the thermal camera images and noticed that the NI DAS rings appear different compared to the pre-blackout configuration (see Fig. 1). In particular, a clear relative misalignment between the two rings is visible, and the power distribution along the vertical direction of the outer ring is non-uniform.

These changes are most likely related to a change in the laser working point, as the main laser power dropped by about 50% after the blackout (as usual, every mistake has a price).

Then, together with Michal and Madda, we performed two DAS power steps to evaluate whether the observed misalignment could be partially compensated by tuning the actuator power.

STEP 1: 18:31 UTC – NI OUTER RING POWER INCREASED BY 10%
PICKOFF: 0.58 W → 0.64 W

Following this change, the sideband level decreased further (fig.2). Therefore, the step was reverted and the power was instead reduced.

STEP 2: 20:08 UTC – NI OUTER RING POWER DECREASED BY 20% WRT STEP 1
PICKOFF: 0.64 W → 0.51 W

This configuration was left for the night.

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