The Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL) has manufactured the most modern Ultra Stable High Power Converters (USHPC) to charge the giant electromagnets for FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research), a major international discovery science programme coming up at Darmstadt, Germany.
It produced the converters in association with Bose Institute of Kolkata with design assistance provided by the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (RRCAT), Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC), Kolkata.
The first batch of 67 converters were flagged off by FAIR Technical MD Jörg Blaurock here on Wednesday. “It is a momentous occasion as this is the culmination of a 10-year journey in collaboration with various institutions. We started from scratch and delivered what the nation has expected us to,” said ECIL chairman and managing director Rear Admiral (retd) Sanjay Chaubey.
The FAIR is studying building blocks of matter and evolution of universe with civil work under way in Germany at 70 metres under the ground. India is a major partner along with Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden and others.
The ECIL has been contracted to supply 750 converters of 28 types for conductivity and super-conductivity to bend the high energy particle beams.
Each converter costs between ₹10 lakh and ₹20 lakh with a total contract worth more than ₹100 crore. The prototype and consignment was cleared after multiple checks for quality and testing, said the CMD. “The FAIR project is a combination of fundamental and applied science with likely spin-offs in medicine and space travel, especially on ways to deal with radiation exposure, high performance computing and so on. It will benefit the entire mankind,” said Mr. Jörg Blaurock.
Former ECIL MD P. Sudhkar said the experience in making high-capacity converters could help in the manufacture of electric vehicles. Director, Indo FAIR Coordination Centre, Subhashis Chattopadhyay, former ECIL CMD Y.S. Mayya and others spoke.
Space missions
The ECIL has commissioned the 32-meter Deep Space Network Antenna for Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) at Byalalu near Bengaluru and it has been providing vital communication support for inter planetary missions like the Chandrayaan.
“We are setting up another 18-metre antenna at the same place for future space missions. We will also to enter into a memorandum of understanding with the ISRO for making more antennas and ground-tracking stations,” informed CMD Rear Admiral (retd) Sanjay Chaubey after the function.
The institute is also setting up 21-metre MACE Telescope at Hanle (Ladakh), which would become the second largest gamma ray telescope in the world, to enhance the understanding of the fields of astrophysics and fundamental physics.
“We are capable of building new nuclear power plants end to end for the Nuclear Power Corporation of India from radiation detectors to instrumentation modules, a whole gamut of reactors under one roof,” he said.
The institute was involved in the international discovery science programmes earlier too like supplying components to Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project of the European Council for Nuclear Research Centre (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland and to the International Thermo-nuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project in Italy. “We are also going to supply solid state power amplifiers to the ‘Fermilab’– another accelerator project being built in Chicago(U.S.),” he added.
