CERN, which hosts the Large Hadron Collider, has great plans and wants to grow and upgrade the particle accelerator over the next few years. But engineers have identified a barrier to upgrading: there is no room for new cables in the injectors that accelerate the particles before entering the LHC.
In the past, when machines needed to be upgraded or added to accelerator parts, engineers often installed new cables as needed. During the procedure this, they left in their place the old cables that were no longer in use. Now, a bunch of outdated cables have created a wall blocking the way to install new ones needed for the next big accelerator upgrade.
To create space for his engineers CERN have set the goal of identifying and removing old, unused cables, which are about 9.000 as a whole.
They report that the disconnection of except λειτουργίας καλωδίων είναι ένα από τα μεγαλύτερα και πιο ακριβά σταυρόλεξα του κόσμου, είναι ένα παιχνίδι high-stakes. Αν αποσυνδέσετε το λάθος καλώδιο στην καλύτερη περίπτωση μπορεί να έχετε χάσει κάποιες δυνατότητες monitoringς των δεδομένων και στην χειρότερη περίπτωση, μπορεί να έχετε τραβήξει ένα κρίσιμο καλώδιο ασφαλείας και απλά να μην λειτουργεί ο επιταχυντής. “Γι ‘αυτό είναι τόσο δύσκολο να ολοκληρωθεί αυτή η λειτουργία, γιατί κάθε λάθος θα μπορούσε να ξεκινήσει μεγάλα problems when restarting the accelerator, ”said Sébastien Evrard, a mechanical engineer in charge of the project.
"Of course, in an ideal world you would remove old and obsolete cables before installing new ones, but that did not happen," said Evrard. "Today, all the cables, along with the cable trays that house them, have really taken up a lot of space and it is no longer possible to add new cables."
Engineers can only work at points are scheduled annual technical maintenance, which lasts two months in the winter. They have begun disconnecting the Proton Synchrotron Booster cables in December, and are now moving to Super Proton Synchrotron. They will not actually remove the cables until the next stop at the end of this year, not so much because they will not have the time and because they want to make sure that so far they have not disrupted the operation of the machines before they get rid of them completely.
Evrard said that in the plans the CERN team had identified about 3.000 obsolete cables in each nozzle and thus 9.000 as a whole. At the same PS Booster, they have already found and disconnected 2.700 from them. Each cable in the PS Booster is about 50 meters long, traveling from the surface of the Earth at the base of CERN down into the injector basement.
CERN's cables are generally related to control systems and security systems, which have undergone many technological upgrades since CERN was founded, 1954. The proton synchrotron, the oldest of the three accelerators, was 1959 for the first time, long before the Large Hadron Collider was built.
