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Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Halfway toward LHC consolidation
The Large Hadron Collider is such a huge and sophisticated machine that the slightest alteration requires an enormous amount of work. During the second long shutdown (LS2), teams are hard at work reinforcing the electrical insulation of the accelerator's superconducting dipole diodes. The LHC contains not one, not two, but 1232 superconducting dipole magnets, each with a diode system to upgrade. That's why no fewer than 150 people are needed to carry out the 70 000 tasks involved in this work.
The project is now halfway to completion. One of the machine's eight sectors, containing 154 magnets, is now closed and the final leak tests are under way. Work is ongoing in the seven other sectors and the teams are working at a rate of ten interconnections consolidated per day.
[...] A plethora of upgrade and maintenance work is also being carried out in the tunnel on all the equipment, from the cryogenics system to the vacuum, beam instrumentation and technical infrastructures.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday October 24 2019, @06:05AM (6 children)
With that many instances of repeated work to be done, it makes me wonder whether the lesser effort would have been to have automated it?
(Score: 1) by Stardaemon on Thursday October 24 2019, @06:44AM (3 children)
Like, replacing the workers with a script?
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Thursday October 24 2019, @06:50AM
Why not, I could do with with some of the people I work with. :)
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday October 24 2019, @07:11AM (1 child)
I was thinking more along the lines of assembly robots. These days you can get ones with vision support that allows them to deal with a more variable environment. I would've thought that someone like Toyota would've been keen to step up to such a challenge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 24 2019, @03:47PM
This is only the second long downtime and I doubt this particular task will be repeated exactly the same way ever again. 1200 units might be worth making specialized tools if they need them but it is still cheaper to train people to do the work than to automate it.
(Score: 2) by bryan on Thursday October 24 2019, @11:51PM (1 child)
Robots operating near superconducting magnets? Perhaps they are afraid it may play out like that scene in Terminator 3 [youtube.com]?
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday October 25 2019, @01:02AM
Considering the tunnels are depressurized to vacuum when those electromagnets are switched on, I think the robots would have a better time than humans...
Also, that movie was clearly very forgettable - I didn't even remember having seen that scene!