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, @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.