Invited Presentations given at EPAC 2004, Lucerne, 5-9 July 2004

by 1) Ph. Lebrun, 2) L. Rossi (AT Department)

Thursday 29 Jul 2004, 14:30 → 15:30 Europe/Zurich

AT Auditorium (CERN)

1) Industrial Technology for Unprecendented Energy and Luminosity: the Large Hadron Collider

With over 2.7 billion Swiss francs procurement contracts under execution in industry and the installation of major technical systems proceeding in its first 3.3 km sector, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) construction is now in full swing at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The LHC is not only the most challenging particle accelerator under construction, it is also the largest global project ever for a scientific instrument based on advanced technology. Starting from accelerator performance requirements, we recall how these can be met by an appropriate combination of technologies, such as high-field superconducting magnets, superfluid helium cryogenics, beam and insulation vacuum or power electronics, with particular emphasis on the developments required to meet demanding specifications, and the industrialization issues which had to be solved for achieving series production of precision components under tight quality assurance and within limited resources. This provides the opportunity for reviewing the production status of the different systems and the progress of the project.

2) Experience with LHC Magnets from Prototyping to Large-scale Industrial Production and Integration

The construction of the LHC superconducting magnets is approaching one third of its completion. At the end of 2003, main dipoles cold masses for more than one octant were delivered; meanwhile the winding for the second octant was almost completed. The other big magnets, like the main quadrupoles and the insertion quadrupoles, have entered into series production as well. Providing more than 20 km of superconducting magnets, with the quality required for an accelerator like LHC, is an unprecedented challenge in term of complexity that has required several steps from the construction of 1 meter-long magnets in the laboratory to today production of more than one 15 meter-long magnet per day in Industry. The work and its organization is made even more complex by the fact that CERN supplies most of the critical components and part of the main tooling to the magnet manufacturers, both for cost reduction and for quality issues. In this paper the critical aspects of the construction and the time plan will be reviewed and the actual achievements in term of quality and construction time will be compared with the expectations.


Organiser(s): Rudiger Schmidt / AB Department
Please note unusual time!