Electronics Corporation of India Limited is among the institutions, which contributed to setting up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) facility at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, where the theory of the Noble prize winning physicists Francois Englert and Peter Higgs was confirmed with the discovery of the Higgs particle last year.
According to the public sector undertaking, the initiative to participate in the significant work at CERN was taken up by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE). Under CERN-DAE Collaboration, ECIL supplied and commissioned at CERN breaker control modules (BCM), quench discharge local protection units (QDLPU) and quench heater power supplies (QHPS).
The main function of the BCM is powering, control and monitoring of special DC circuit breakers of 13 kilo amps capacity used in power lines to extract accelerator ring’s energy. The QDLPU detects the quenches in any state of the powering cycle of the accelerator and triggers the QHPS, ECIL stated.
“The successful and timely completion of the above projects at CERN established ECIL as an organisation capable of meeting international commitments and opened up opportunities to participate in upcoming major international projects like ITER at France and FAIR at Germany,” ECIL chairman and managing director, P Sudhakar, stated.
He also said ECIL was setting up a state-of-the-art power electronics laboratory at its premises in Hyderabad to meet the new opportunities.
