Study of gas contaminants and interaction with materials in RPC closed loop system

TL;DR

This paper investigates how gas contaminants and purifier lifespan affect the performance of RPC detectors in LHC experiments, providing insights into system optimization and maintenance.

Contribution

It presents a systematic long-term study on gas purifiers, contaminants, and detector performance, including purifier lifetime and contaminant release analysis.

Findings

Purifier lifetime varies with usage and material

Contaminant levels correlate with detector dark currents

Gas system performance depends on filter status

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 new 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.