Operating HADES safely
The EURIDICE operation and safety team is responsible for the technical installation. With an operation & safety manager in the lead, a technical engineer and three technicians our team is experienced and ready to tackle every issue in the underground and guarantee the smooth operation of HADES. Moreover, all members of the operation & safety team wear green helmets underground, which means they have been trained to operate the hoisting installations and act adequately in case of emergency. In mining terms, they are the machinists of the installation. When we welcome visitors to HADES, there will always be at least one green helmet to accompany the visit. So when in doubt in the underground: look for the green helmet!
The various tasks of the EURIDICE operation & safety team
Safety of the installation
First and foremost, our operation & safety team is responsible for the safety of the workers and visitors in the HADES underground research lab. As green helmets, they are always present when there are people down in HADES. Moreover, their impressive range of responsibilities ensures the safety of everyone below.
Maintenance and checks
The teams ensures that all systems, such as the hoisting installations, the emergency elevators, the monitoring equipment and instrumentation of the experiments, run properly. The team performs regular maintenance on these systems and organizes and assists specialized companies to perform periodic inspections.
Drilling boreholes and setting up experiments
The EURIDICE technical team, in consultation with the scientists, set up experiments and the measuring equipment to monitor them. The first step is to drill holes through the concrete wall of the gallery and into the clay. This is always done on the intersections of two concrete blocks to avoid too much perturbation of the gallery lining. Drilling of holes is also done to extract clay cores, pristine clay samples for analysis in the above-ground laboratories at SCK CEN and other institutions. The EURIDICE technical team can make boreholes with a diameter of between 10 centimeters and about half a meter, up to 40 meters in length.
Our operation & safety team is very experienced in working in the underground, however it is not equipped to excavate and construct full-size galleries and shafts. This requires contractors with experience in underground infrastructure works.
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Ensuring smooth operation of running experiments
The technical team makes sure that the experiments in HADES run smoothly. The instrumentation and monitoring of our experiments allows our scientists to collect all the data on the server, they thus do not need to descend to HADES all that often.
Some experiments require quite some work from our technicians, as they are employed to collect all kinds of data during certain experimental campaigns. This is also part of their work: helping our scientists with their experimental designs and discussing the work methods and feasibility of data collection campaigns, installing new experiments, dismantling finished experiments, etcetera.
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Renovating the shafts
In some cases, the operation & safety team needs to call in additional help to ensure the future safety and operation of HADES. This is the case for the renovation projects of the shafts and hoisting installations, for which we rely on an additional project engineer and external contractors. Being excavated and installed in the early '80s, the first shaft already underwent a total renovation in 2021. The second shaft, installed 25 years ago, will also be renovated in the coming years. This large project is currently being prepared.
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