Summary:
- The (120V) UPS at the vacuum rack is faulty.
- The drypump backing TP2 is faulty.
- Current status of vacuum system:
- The old UPS is now powering the rack again. Sometime ago, I noticed the "replace battery" indicator light on this unit was on. But it is no longer on. So I judged this is the best course of action. At least this UPS hasn't randomly failed before...
- main vol is being pumped by TP1, backed by TP3.
- TP2 remains off.
- The annular volumes are isolated for now while we figure out what's up with TP2.
- The pressure went up to ~1 mtorr (c.f. ~600utorr that is the nominal value with the stuck RV2) during the whole episode but is coming back down now.
- Steve seems to have taken the reliability of the vacuum system with him.
Details:
Around 7pm, the UPS at the vacuum rack seems to have failed. Don't ask me why I decided to check the vacuum screen 10 mins after the failure happened, but the point is, this was a silent failure so the protocols need to be looked into.
Going to the rack, I saw (unsurprisingly) that the 120V UPS was off.
- Pushed the power on button - the LCD screen would briefly light up, say the line voltage was 120 V, and then turned itself off. Not great.
- I traced the power connection to the UPS itself to a power strip under the rack - then I moved the plug from one port to another. Now the UPS stays on. okay...
- but after ~3 mins while I'm hunting for a VGA cable, I hear an incessant beeping. The UPS display has the "Fault" indicator lit up.
- I decided to shift everything back to the old UPS. After the change was made, I was able to boot up the c1vac machine again, and began the recovery process.
- When I tried to start TP2, the drypump was unusually noisy, and I noticed PTP2 bottomed out at ~500 torr (yes torr). So clearly something is not right here. This pump supposedly had its tip-seal replaced by Jordan just 3 months ago. This is not a normal lifetime for the tip seal - we need to investigate more in detail what's going on here...
- Decided that an acceptable config is to pump the main volume (so that we can continue working on other parts of the IFO). The annuli are all <10mtorr and holding, so that's just fine I think.
Questions:
- Are the failures of TP2 drypump and UPS related? Or coincidence? Who is the chicken and who is the egg?
- What's up with the short tip seal lifetime?
- Why did all of this happen without any of our systems catching it and sending an alert??? I have left the UPS connected to the USB/ethernet interface in case anyone wants to remotely debug this.
For now, I think this is a safe state to leave the system in. Unless I hear otherwise, I will leave it so - I will be in the lab another hour tonight (~10pm).
Some photos and a screen-cap of the Vac medm screen attached. |