Commissioning of experimental enclosures (Hutches) at the Advanced Photon Source - A to Z ALARA.

The Advanced Photon Source (APS), 7 GeV electron Storage Ring at the Argonne National Laboratory is designed to be a major national user facility providing high-brilliance x-ray beams. Figure 1 shows a plan view of the APS. At completion, APS will have 35 bending magnet (BM) beamlines and 35 insertion device (ID) beamlines. A typical x-ray beamline at APS comprises of a front end (FE) that confines the beam; a first optics enclosure (FOE) which houses optics to filter and monochromatize the beam; and beam transports, additional optics, and the experiment stations. Figure 2 shows a section of the storage ring with the layout of the ID and BM beamlines and typical experiment stations. The first x-ray beam was delivered to an experiment station in 1995. Ever since, to date, over 120 experimental stations (hutches) have been commissioned and are receiving intense x-ray beams of varying energies for various experiments. This paper describes in some detail the steps involved in the process of commissioning experimental stations and the implementation of the ALARA at each step.