CASE STUDY: Safe comms, above and below

A TETRA system is providing safety communications at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, one of the most challenging environments on Earth.

As many as 12,000 people work at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) at any one time, including physicists and engineers from dozens of countries whose collaborative work is aimed at gaining a greater understanding of the fundamental structure of the universe. Many of the discoveries made at CERN help improve everyday life by enabling advances in areas ranging from medicine to computing.

CERN’s operations are distributed over an area of 60 square kilometres that straddles the border between France and Switzerland. In addition to 600 surface buildings, there are over 50 kilometres of underground tunnels, including a 27-kilometre-long circular tunnel located some 50 to 150 metres underground containing the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

In 2013, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W Higgs for their theoretical work on the Higgs boson, whose existence was confirmed by experiments at the LHC.

The combination of above- and below-ground environments makes providing organisation-wide communications a real challenge. CERN needed a solution that would encompass all its needs with one coherent system. It chose a TETRA system from Sepura.

The communications challenge was threefold. The first was to equip CERN with a complete solution comprising infrastructure, radios and applications, all capable of delivering seamless communications above and below ground, and in extreme environments where the presence of powerful magnetic fields presents unique challenges for wireless radio equipment.

The second challenge was to provide CERN’s in-house fire brigade with TETRA radios that would operate under the facility’s challenging conditions. The highly specialised brigade is trained to deal with a wide variety of risks.

The third challenge was to improve safety for lone workers.

Meeting the challenge

With so much of the facility located underground, it was a challenge for CERN to implement reliable communications systems for its fire brigade and for the security and maintenance teams who carry out other safety-related work. Analog radio systems were already in use, but their limitations included a lack of interoperability between different systems, no ability to track an individual’s precise location and no connectivity to the French or Swiss public safety networks.

CERN organised a call for tender for an integrated replacement system that overcame these limitations and selected Sepura’s bespoke critical communications solution. This covers CERN’s entire site, both above and below ground, including the LHC tunnel. Three radio antennas support over 300 TETRA terminals, and the network is fully redundant.

The network enables communications for CERN’s fire brigade, security and maintenance teams. In addition, if members of the French or Swiss public safety services are called to an incident, they can use their TETRA radios throughout the infrastructure deployed for CERN.

The right radio for each user

CERN’s firefighters use STP8X hand-portable radios for all their operational communications. These robust, intrinsically safe devices are waterproof and dustproof in line with the latest and most stringent V6 of the IECEx/ATEX standard. They provide the firefighters with loud, clear audio and very high-resolution displays that are critical for effective communication in noisy, smoky and hazardous environments. Their tactile keypad is easy to use even when wearing the heavy gloves that are part of the fire brigade’s protective gear.

“Sepura’s reliable ATEX hand-portables help our firefighters stay safe and effective, because they carry on working under the most extreme conditions,” says Yann Léchevin, Projects Leader and Chef d'Etat-Major within CERN's Fire and Rescue Services. “On top of that, firefighters can use them to send short text messages such as ‘Arrived at destination’, enabling us to monitor the progress of a call-out in real time.”

Wardens, maintenance engineers and other groups use STP8000 hand-portables and vehicle- or desk-mountable SRG3900 mobiles. Supplementing CERN’s existing closed GSM network that enables point-to-point communications, the TETRA devices are typically used to set up talk groups for teams or to enhance the personal safety of individuals working alone.

“When we demonstrated the Sepura radios ahead of rollout, all of the different user groups quickly understood the benefits they offered and were very taken with the radios’ user-centric design. In fact, some of our colleagues were quite reluctant to hand the radios back at the end of the day!” says Aurélie Pascal, Telecommunications Engineer within CERN’s IT department.

Protection for lone workers

Individuals often work alone in vast areas underground at CERN, and ensuring their personal safety is a top priority. As well as an emergency button, users can press to call the fire brigade directly in an emergency - all the STP8000 and STP8X hand-portables include sophisticated ‘man-down’ functionality. Based on motion sensing technology, the radio automatically alerts the fire brigade if a user is motionless or suffers a serious impact.

These features are combined with Sepura’s STProtect in-building tracking and location solution, consisting of beacons and software that enable a user’s position to be precisely displayed on a map of the CERN site if a man-down alarm sounds, and accelerating the rescue operation.

Sepura’s GPS localisation functionality was put to the test when a CERN security guard working in isolation fainted. “Thanks to the man-down alarm and the ability to pinpoint his location, he was rapidly found and rescued,” reports Léchevin. “We couldn’t have asked for a better demonstration of the benefits of the Sepura lone-worker solution.”