A study of gas contaminants and interaction with materials in RPC closed loop systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates the long-term effects of gas contaminants and purifier performance on RPC detector operation in LHC experiments, providing insights into purifier lifetime and detector stability in recirculated gas systems.

Contribution

It presents a systematic study of gas purifiers, contaminants, and detector performance over time, highlighting the correlation between filter status, contaminants, and detector response.

Findings

Purifier lifetime varies with usage and contaminant levels.

Gas contaminants influence RPC dark currents and detector stability.

Filter degradation correlates with increased contaminants and detector response changes.

Abstract

Resistive Plate Counters (RPC) detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments use gas recirculation systems to cope with large gas mixture volumes and costs. In this paper a long-term systematic study about gas purifiers, gas contaminants and detector performance is discussed. The study aims at measuring the lifetime of purifiers with unused and used cartridge material along with contaminants release in the gas system. During the data-taking the response of several RPC double-gap detectors was monitored in order to characterize the correlation between dark currents, filter status and gas contaminants.