Reports until 18:34, Friday 09 March 2012
H2 General
rich.abbott@LIGO.ORG - posted 18:34, Friday 09 March 2012 (2407)
ETMY Cable Shield Grounding
Today Betsy fixed the ground points in the suspension wiring where the metal backshells of the connectors serving the UIM and PUM were grounded by the saddle clamp.  I will check to see the status of the SUS shield grounds tomorrow.

Vincent and I worked through the ISI cable shields for the L4Cs, GS13s, Coil Drives, and Trilliums.  We found two anomalous grounds, one on L4C-2 and one on L4C-3.  Both of these grounding points were traced to the connectors at each L4C can the vacuum system.  If the connectors are unplugged from the L4C's, then the grounding issue goes away.

I speculate that the ground is caused by the fact that the strain relief screws that attach the backshells of the connectors to the L4C can are bridging the gap between the can and the metal backshell of the connector.  If these screws were screwed in (as they should be prior to inserting the cartridge), the problem may go away.  It's near impossible to get up high enough to test this theory at present, so the final verification will have to be done during the installation of the cartridge when the connectors are more accessible.

The good news is that so far, I have not seen any instances of the cable shields casually contacting the ISI structure as they route all over the place.  There are numerous contact points, but the outer black PEEK weave seems to reliably prevent the shields from grounding.  I was more than a little worried that the larger sample size of cables and contact points would reveal a weakness in my small statistics of reliability.