Today we commenced a planned 3-week shutdown of OPAL, mainly to make major improvements to the control system for OPAL’s cold-neutron source. The OPAL Reactor itself is expected to return to service on 28 June, but we have held back an additional week as a contingency.
So full user service is only expected to resume on 4 July, for all of OPAL’s neutron beam instruments, with the exception of our TAIPAN thermal 3-axis spectrometer.
As we announced on 20 March 2014, TAIPAN will remain out of service for another two months until 12 September 2014: its extended shutdown allows us to install the ARC-funded beryllium-filter (secondary-spectrometer) option and integrate it into TAIPAN.
During the same outage, the shielding wall between TAIPAN and the adjacent SIKA cold 3-axis spectrometer will be moved and extra dance-floor panels installed, to increase the Q-range available on TAIPAN.