The 10th Particle Accelerator Engineering Network annual meeting took place at the Cockcroft Institute on the 6th September The network was jointly created by the IET, IMechE, IoP and STFC and is hosted by the IET as one of their technical networks. This years meeting had 120 delegates from all areas of engineering of particle accelerators. This years keynote talk was by Klaus Hanke from CERN who is the FCC chair of Technical Infrastructure, who spoke on the engineering challenges for FCC.
Over the lunch break there was an early career engineer poster competition which included PhD students, Masters Students, year in industry students, technicians and graduate engineers. The PAEN committee played the role of judges for the competition, and the winning entry was Luke Farley who is an MSc student from Lancaster University/ the Cockcroft Institute for his poster Thermal Management and Collector Design Optimisation for a High-Efficiency Multi-Beam Klystron. The judges felt than Luke had excellent ability to talk about the poster and answer questions.
After lunch there was a panel discussion with industry leaders taking questions from the audience about recruitment and retention of engineers and technicians in the accelerator sector. The panel was chaired by Graeme Burt (Cockcroft), and included John Allen- Chief Engineer at Elekta, Phil Atkinson- Head of Mechanical, Metrology and Technical Engineering at STFC Daresbury Laboratory, Alan Wheenhouse, Head of the RF group in ASTeC/STFC, Martin Hughes, Magnet Power Supplies Group Leader, STFC-ISIS, Jon Speed, Accelerator Engineering Group Leader, STFC-ISIS Division at STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Laura Corner- Lecturer in Laser Engineering at Liverpool/Cockcroft. The discussion was rather lively and the audience were fully integrated into the discussions.
At the end of the meeting it was announced that Martin Court from Elekta will be taking over from Graeme Burt as chair of the Particle Accelerator Engineering Network. We are hoping to have NVEC this November at Strathclyde. Next years Annual meeting will be either in Oxford or Crawley in 2025.
We are seeking three new members of our committee. Committee members should be engineers or technicians working in particle accelerators but can be at any stage of their career and be from labs, academia or industry. Applications from diverse backgrounds are encouraged. The committee meets 4 times per year (one of which is normally in person) and are involved in organising group activities. Appointments are for a term of 3 years. To apply contact Gemma Hadley (GHadley@theiet.org) before the 19th November. Applications will be balanced against a skills matrix to ensure the committee covers the full range of engineering disciplines.
Sign-up for Accelerator Engineering info
We have set-up a mailing list for people interested in news on particle accelerator engineering in the UK. This is a personal initiative and not part of the IET, IMechE or IOP. We will send out announcements of workshops and events via this mailing list as well as sending round a new bi-annual PAEN newsletter that will be created in 2022. To sign up please visit
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa-jisc.exe?SUBED1=PARACCENGUK&A=1
Website
Our website is moving to the new IET Eng-X programme. It’s a bit bare at present but will be updated over the next month or so to include more details
https://engx.theiet.org/technical-networks/partacc
Its all done via hashtags so to find posts about the network you have to search for #particle accelerators