Time lines

The Expansion Initiative is a five-year project, covering CY2008 through CY2012, that will significantly improve cold neutron measurement capabilities at NIST.

The reactor was shut down on April 3, 2011 and restarted to low power on February 8, 2012.
During the post-outage period, which runs until December 31, 2012, several new instruments will be commissioned.
In the post-expansion period further work to install and commission additional instruments will be undertaken. expansion initiative schedule

A new cold source, for the MACS-II spectrometer, has been installed in beam tube 9 (BT-9).
The first elements of the seven existing guides have been replaced.
The new guides, NG-A through NG-D, have been installed in the confinement building C-100 and through the "D wing" (D-100) into the guide hall (G-100).

The timeline below shows the outage of the neutron source with startup to 20 MW in early 2012. Thereafter the reactor will be operated in standard fashion, i.e. cycles of 38 days operating and 11 days shut down, with the possibility of minor departures from this schedule.
Guide installation has proceeded as shown, with installation of the NG-A guide planned for January 2013. The remaining bars in the timeline represent progress on various new instruments.
The restart of existing instruments will call for one or more weeks of commissioning followed by regular operation. The 30 m SANS machine that is currently located at the NG-3 guide will be moved to the NG-B_u guide in January 2013, and the neutron spin echo (NSE) spectrometer will be relocated to the NG-A guide later that year.

NCNR Expansion Initiative main page.
NCNR home page.

Last modified 09-March-2012