LHC inspection identifies bad splices - February 02, 2009
The folks repairing the Large Hadron Collider have spotted more bad connections of the sort that led to last autumn's catastrophic accident. But this time, they've found and fixed the problem before it caused tens of millions of Swiss Francs in damage and months of delays.
As a brief refresher, the LHC uses finger-sized ribbons of superconducting niobium-titanium wire to move the thousands of amps of current that it needs for its superconducting magnets. In September, a bad splice between two sections of wire caused a section of the ribbon to loose its superconductivity and heat up very, very quickly. The result wasn't pretty.
In the wake of the accident, the LHC project team made a number of changes to try and catch bad splices before they failed. That's just what they seem to have done in another sector (Sector 1-2). They suspect another bad splice is lurking in Sector 6-7, and they're warming it up just in case.
They claim that all this work will not add further delay to the LHC restart, which is now scheduled for mid-summer.
image: CERN
