October 8, 2009

Light Source Employees Honor Year's Achievements, Co-Workers at Annual Picnic

Discounting dark skies and sprinkles, almost 200 Light Source Directorate employees gathered on September 16 for food, drinks, and the chance to reflect upon the past year's accomplishments. The annual picnic, hosted by NSLS Chair Chi-Chang Kao and Steve Dierker, Associate Laboratory Director for Light Sources and NSLS-II Project Director, included mounds of Italian salads, pastas, meats, and dessert as well as personal awards for some of the best work performed in fiscal year 2009.

Service awards

Employees recognized for 10 years of service included Alain Domingo, Steven Ehrlich, Laura Miller, Lisa Miller, Jorge Oliva, Boris Podobedov, Anthony Santiago, and Anna Sweet. In the 20-year category were Jim Biancarosa, Donna Buckley, Michael Buckley, Scott Coburn, John Cupolo, William Jew, Tom Joos, Corinne Messana, Kathryn Warburton, Gary Weiner, and Edward Zeitler. Robert Best, Larry Fareria, Tom Nehring, John Skaritka, Peter Ratzke, and Raymond Raynis were recognized for 25 years of service. And Rudy Alforque, Steven Bennett, Anthony Lenhard, Tony Mendez, William Newburgh, Gary Nintzel, Slobodan Pjerov, Robert Scheuerer, and Charles Spataro received 30-year awards.

Spotlight awards

The Spotlight awards are tributes to NSLS and NSLS-II staff members who have shown exceptional dedication to their jobs during the year. This year, the winners were:

Members of the Light Sources Directorate in front of the NSLS-II construction site.

Rodger Hubbard: The ultra-high brightness of the NSLS-II is due to the low emittance of the storage ring. This is achieved in part by high-precision alignment of the magnets. During the magnet alignment R&D, it was found that the girders could see a non-repeatable residual deflection of up to 20 µm. In order to reduce this unacceptable deflection, it was necessary to accurately profile the top surface of the girder. Unfortunately, profiling a 5-m long girder without the benefit of modern coordinate-measuring machine equipment turned out to be a very difficult task. Hubbard proposed using laser trackers to profile the girders, even though the trackers' technical specifications are not consistent with this level of accuracy. He independently devised a procedure for such a profiling and persisted in his efforts, often working late and during off-days, until the procedure worked reliably. He was eventually able to demonstrate that the girder profiling could be accomplished to ~5 µm level.

Kun Qian: Qian, an NSLS senior technology analyst, was honored for her outstanding performance in the upgrade of beamline X6A's end station. During this work, Qian went beyond her job responsibilities and was key in identifying specific problems; planning the upgrade with fellow colleagues; evaluating and suggesting changes to the control of the new setup; removing the old experimental end station; and installing the new upgraded end station. Qian stayed long hours and worked weekends until the upgrade was completed, working, and fully tested. Thanks to Qian's careful planning and effective interaction with suppliers, the actual implementation took less then seven days from the removal of the old end-station to the commissioning of the upgraded end-station. The concentrated effort on her part allowed users to collect data and solve structures in less than two weeks from the start of the upgrade.

Claire Retundi and Peter Selgrad: For about a month and a half in the summer of 2009, the Light Source Directorate's Project Controls Group and the Business Operations Group worked closely together to determine which tasks within Torcon's final schedule for NSLS-II construction should be coded as American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)-funded work. Selgrad, of Project Controls, coordinated this effort, bringing together the right people at the right time to review the schedule against funds that were needed and available. Retundi, of Business Operations, also was instrumental in this process, as she needed to clearly and concisely communicate how the decisions being made would affect the ability to properly accrue and/or pay invoices. This process was completed within a very short timeframe with a great deal of review. It is a great example of teamwork.

NSLS and NSLS-II employees enjoy their food at the annual recognition picnic.

Tony Santiago: Santiago, a senior technical specialist, was able to make a dated monitoring device operational through lots of persistence and creativity. The equipment, which was purchased to observe the power coming into the NSLS, came with outdated software. When Santiago acquired the latest software, he discovered that it only communicated serially, which caused the use of the device to be slow and painful. To overcome this hurdle, Santiago decided to communicate with the device through Ethernet and taught himself a new scripting language to automate the communication process. In the end, the result is a system that is both useful to the control room and that has provided an explanation for beam dumps and drop-outs that were previously unresolved. Santiago's relentless drive has given the NSLS the ability to know whether a problem was caused by bad power supplied to the facility or equipment that needs attention.

Bruno Semon: Semon, of NSLS-II Conventional Facilities Department, played an instrumental role in ensuring safety, environmental compliance, and quality during the start of the ring building construction. This period was a challenging time for the contractor and its subcontractors because they needed to set up site logistics and establish their site office, all while starting work. Semon put in long hours, making sure that everything went as smoothly as possible – even coming in during the middle of the night numerous times to receive large excavation equipment that can only be delivered after 10 p.m. From the start, Semon made sure that the work was in compliance with the contract documents and with the policies and procedures that ensure safety and quality. Early during this period, unforeseen environmental issues arose when piping filled with glycol was discovered, threatening the contractor's access to certain areas of the site. Semon worked closely with the BNL environmental compliance division and the contractor to ensure that the remediation went smoothly and that there was no negative impact to the project.

Xi Yang: Shortly after coming to the NSLS, Yang took over the responsibilities of a booster physicist. In some of her X-Ray Ring injection studies, it was established that a significant amount of Booster beam was lost in a short region around the extraction area, where there is limited steering ability. To address this limitation, Yang spearheaded the effort to add a pulsed steering magnet to the beginning of the Booster-to-X-Ray transfer line. As a result of this effort, a compact, C-frame, pulsed trim magnet was designed, built, measured, and installed in the Booster-to-X-Ray extraction line. With optimized kick settings, injection rates approximately doubled, reducing the X-Ray Ring refill time to a record five minutes. Additionally, operating with the new magnet reduces radiation levels in some locations by up to a factor of three. This improvement is greatly appreciated by operators and users and it also improves the NSLS machine reliability metric, since it allows for a faster restart from any problems with the X-Ray Ring that result in a beam dump.