Fermilab Science Editor Anne Heavey has shared an article in which our technician Daniel Salisbury highlights the complexity involved in producing the Anode Plane Assemblies (APAs) that are key to DUNE's mission to study neutrino oscillations.
Excerpts from the Fermilab article:
The bare APA frames, custom made by commercial industry, are shipped to DUNE’s two APA production points — one at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Daresbury Laboratory in the U.K. and the other at the University of Chicago in the U.S. — where they are checked for alignment, carefully cleaned, and meticulously outfitted with the hardware and wires that turn them into APAs.
"The placement and orientation of each element, the order in which it is installed, and the size and torque of the screws that hold it in place have all been explicitly engineered, and the instructions must be followed to a T,” said Daniel Salisbury, the lead detector technician at Daresbury. “An added complication is the fact that whereas the bare frames are all identical, the detector requires multiple variants in terms of the outfitting.”
The fastest that an APA has been constructed starting from the bare frame is 30 days, but 40 days is more typical. With five — soon to be seven — winding machines, a larger team, and an earlier start, the Daresbury factory produces on average three APAs per month.
This production rate ensures that by the time far detector installation begins in South Dakota in early 2028, the necessary number of APAs will arrive each month, until all 150 of DUNE’s sophisticated “screen doors” are safely delivered to take their place in one of the most ambitious physics experiments ever conceived.
A completed APA at the University of Chicago. Credit: Anne Heavey, Fermilab
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full article on Fermilab's website.
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