Maintenance Policy at the ESRF

     L.  Hardy, ESRF, BP 220 avenue des Martyrs, 38043 Grenoble Cedex.

 WAO'98 Abstract

  The ESRF is a X-ray source of the third generation.  The accelerator
  complex is composed of a Linear accelerator (e- 200 MeV), a synchrotron
  (300 meters - 6 GeV) and a Storage Ring (844 metres).  There are several
  thousands of interlocks to protect the various equipment, which can be
  triggered to kill the beam.  The Machine operates more than 7000 hours / 
  year and delivers nearly 6000 hours of X-ray beam to 40 beam lines
  simultaneously, operating 24 hours a day.  Some of these are industrial
  and pay for beam time.  These constraints impose a strict policy of
  maintenance (preventive and curative) and upgrading of the different
  pieces of equipment.  In 1998, 81 days are scheduled for maintenance
  during 5 shutdowns.  All the failures are tracked and sorted into
  classes  of equipment.  This allows the Operation Group to analyse the
  trends and the person responsible for equipment to initiate action.  In
  addition to this, weekly meetings are held to discuss in detail all the
  problems that have occurred during the week.  This policy appears to be
  successful since the beam availability is increasing year after year and
  is now reaching  95 % of scheduled time (the remaining 5 % is shared
  between the time for the refills (2 %), and the time lost due to
  failures (3 %)).  This paper will describe how the failures are tracked,
  how this tracking helps to trigger actions, how the Operators can
  contribute in the maintenance/upgrading work.