Milestone progress for Diamond-II project in first year of preliminary funding

In its first year of preliminary funding, the Diamond-II upgrade has made milestone progress in advancing the frontiers of world-changing science.

This comprehensive programme of scientific and technical updates will push the boundaries of UK research into new territories and the work delivered in 2021 supported this vision. The standout hurdle of securing the outline business case (OBC) was achieved last November 2021; this was the culmination of hard work which cemented the foundations for the case by which the upgrade could be done. Since then, Diamond's dedicated project teams of engineering and research professionals has shifted the focus to the technical design report (TDR) for the new machine. Additionally, the priority flagship beamlines each have had their own conceptual design reports (CDRs) which outline their advanced research capabilities, together with the appropriate engagement with the respective user communities.

Professor Andrew Harrison, Diamond CEO and SRO for the upgrade programme commented:  

Since the Machine Advisory Committee meeting held in March 2022 where the draft TDR was discussed, the project team is making progress with finalising all the details and financial implications in readiness for the final report to be ready in May/June 2022.  

The next big challenge will be a review of costs and the  proposed programme management schedule which will take place with an external committee review set by UKRI’s STFC.

Achieving this phenomenal level of change with as little impact on our operations as possible will mean meticulous planning and involvement from staff across all divisions of Diamond.  Some of these staff were part of the original Diamond team responsible for the construction of the initial machine more than 20 years ago.   In addition to our project management team, the associated phases of the project fall under four distinct work packages;   

• Machine – to cover every stage of machine upgrade from design, procurement and testing through to removal of old components and assembling and installation of new components
• Beamlines – to include modification of existing beamlines to accommodate the new beam  source and building of new flagship beamlines
• Data and Computation – to manage a new IT infrastructure, including software developments to manage instrumentation, control, acquisition & detector readouts and data analysis for high rate applications
• Infrastructure – to oversee requirements for the additional ~10,000 m2 of assembly/storage space required for the upgrade (on and off site),  upgrade infrastructure systems for the new machine and provide necessary general manpower effort across technical groups

As our preparations progress, we will be publishing further updates on the exciting developments in the coming months.