Urania meeting - Dec. 19th, 2018

Wednesday 19 Dec 2018, 18:00 → 19:00 Europe/Rome

18:00 → 18:20 DAr Gas Storage and transportation

Speaker: Richard Ford (SNOLAB)

Slides High_Pressure_Argon_Storage.pdf

At the BNL meeting on 12/17/18, Richard Ford presented an option for the transportatin and storage of argon at high pressure (500 bar).  This looks like a very interesting options, espeically when it comes to the long-term storage at SNOLAB in sight of the Argo detector.  

A technical and economical discussion will follow, with both the cryogenic and high-pressure gass transportation options explored, and a presentation made to the technical board for a decision of the best short-term and long-term options.  The action item here is to get the required people together for a first conversation about the technical aspects of both options.  This will produce technical descriptions of each option and then an economic analysis of each can be carried out.

18:20 → 18:40 Personnel Discussion

Convener: Henning Back

It was announced that Temple will be pulling out from the Urania project.  This stems from their main participant, James Wilhelmi leaving the Temple group.  Discussion is being had about the possibility of diverting the salary money at Temple so that it can still be used for the Urania project.

Jon Davis provided his CV, it is quite strong and he could be a good candidate for one of the Urania full-time positions.  Since there will be decisions made in the new year by the nationals labs with regards to their support for DS-20k and the Global Argon Dark Matter Program, and this could impact who employees the Urania full-time staff, no immediate decision is taken and discussion will be had in the new year.

18:40 → 19:00 Tender Discussion

Convener: Marino Simeone (NA)

The full tender has been released by the INFN, it can be found here https://ted.europa.eu/TED/notice/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:545420-2018:TEXT:IT:HTML&src=0.  

The immediate step is to get a comprehensive list of potential contractors, Marino has started to collect the information in the shared Google doc found here.  It is recommended to input any company contact information you may have, but be sure that the companies do meet the standards listed in the tender, having a minimum amount of annual turnover and expertise in gas separation and cryogenic disitllation.

Andrea Ianni confirms that time t_0 for the Urania schedule has now passed and we are currently in line with the latest update of the DS-20k overall project schedule.