Today we commenced a planned 3-week shutdown of OPAL, mainly to make major improvements to the control system for OPAL’s cold-neutron source. The OPAL Reactor itself is expected to return to service on 28 June, but we have held back an additional week as contingency.
So full user service is only expected to resume on 4 July, for all of OPAL’s neutron beam instruments, with the exception of our TAIPAN thermal 3-axis spectrometer.
As we announced on 20 March, TAIPAN will remain out of service for another two months until 12 September 2014: its extended shutdown allows us to install the ARC-funded beryllium-filter (secondary-spectrometer) option and integrate it into TAIPAN.
During the same outage, the shielding wall between TAIPAN and the adjacent SIKA cold 3-axis spectrometer will be moved and extra dance-floor panels installed, in order to increase the Q-range available on TAIPAN.
Published: 07/06/2014