Liquid argon calorimetry

Integrated computer aided engineering and design techniques can be applied to a large variety of problems at the SSC. Two such problems, endcap cryostat designs and the cooling of electronics immersed in liquid argon, are presented in this paper. The cryostat designs were optimized, using sophisticated three dimensional solid modelers, for a minimum of dead material in front of active calorimeter elements. Although the primary design goal was improving calorimeter's energy resolution and minimizing electron conversion int he walls, the optimized designs had to be structurally stable with respect to stress and buckling under gravity, thermal and pressure loads. Different materials were investigated as alternatives to the nominal aluminum structure as an attempt to further reduce the wall thickness. This paper concludes with a discussion of thermal modeling of electronics immersed in LAr and a comparison of a simple experiment with the model predictions