UKRI-2425 Custom Water Tank for Experiments at Boulby Underground Laboratory

Tender description

The BUTTON project is organised and managed by STFC with staff at STFC responsible for the facilitating access to the host laboratory and for the health and safety of all personnel working on the project underground. Boulby staff will accept delivery of the tank and supervise the installation in the underground laboratory. Partners within academia are funded by STFC to support the development, design, installation, and operation of the BUTTON project. The principal investigator (PI) for the project is based at the University of Sheffield and the integration manager at the University of Liverpool. The project manager and PI have appointed a team led by a work package lead to organise activity relating to the tank. Once the tank is installed a group of engineers, scientists and technicians will be responsible for the installation and experimental operation of the project, under the supervision of Boulby staff. Lot 1: STFC has funded a project to develop neutrino detection technologies for nuclear non-proliferation activities as part of an international programme with partners in the UK and USA. The project is funded in the UK by the Fund for International Collaboration and by the Ministry of Defence (MOD) as part of the nuclear threat reduction activity led by the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) and by National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in the USA. A key aspect of the joint programme of work is the construction of a neutrino detection technology testbed, the BUTTON (Boulby Underground Testbed for Technologies Observing Neutrinos) experiment, at Boulby Underground Laboratory. The BUTTON testbed will be used to evaluate the performance of scintillation media such as water based liquid scintillator and liquidO and new detection technologies such as wavelength shifting plate detectors and large area picosecond photodetectors (LAPPDs). The design of the BUTTON testbed comprises a cylindrical tank that will contain 30 tonnes of liquid media, as illustrated in Figure 1. An internal support structure that will cover the inside surface area will be mounted to the base of the tank that will support up to 96 photomultiper tubes (PMTs) that will cover the surface area of the tank walls, base, and lid.