Conclusions from 12 Years Operational Experience of the Cryoplants for the Superconducting Magnets of the LEP Experiments

The Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP) has ended its last physics run in November 2000, and it is at present being dismantled to liberate the tunnel for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project to be completed by end of 2005. The cryogenic systems for the superconducting solenoid and focusing quadrupoles for the two LEP experiments, ALEPH and DELPHI, each supplying a cooling power of 800 W / 4.5 K entropy equivalent, have accumulated more then 100'000 hours of running time. The paper summarises the 12 years cryogenic experience in the various operating modes: cool-down, steady state, recovery after energy fast dump, utilities failures and warm-up of the superconducting magnets. The detailed operation statistics is presented and compared to the other CERN cryogenic systems. Emphasis is given to the technical analysis of the fault conditions and of their consequences on the helium refrigeration production time in view of the future operation of the LHC cryogenics.