This thesis was prepared at the CERN laboratory (Switzerland) on the equipment of the Large Hadron Collider detector. During the forthcoming ATLAS upgrade, a new CO2 cooling plant will be installed to replace the current cooling system based on a high environmental impact gas.
The purpose of this thesis was to design a support frame for the aforementioned plant. Furthermore, a damping system was proposed to improve the efficiency of that currently used for testing on the plant. A vibrational analysis with the new damper parameters was performed for the whole system. The pre-existing support frame was taken as a reference and it served as a starting point for the design. The overall stiffness was initially improved and subsequently adapted to the new geometric and environmental constraints.
The design consisted in producing the support frame mechanical drawings, and then elaborating the structural verifications according to the Eurocode and FEM simulations. The vibrational assessment included a modal analysis, a harmonic response and a spectrum analyses.