Slashdot Mirror
LHC Shut Down By Transformer Malfunction
Ortega-Starfire writes "A 30-ton transformer in the Large Hadron Collider malfunctioned, requiring complete replacement on the day the LHC came online. No one at CERN reported any problems, and they only released this data once the Associated Press sent people to investigate rumors of problems. I guess it's hard to just sweep a 30-ton transformer breaking under the rug."
yet. Now I have another chance to try all of those world ending pickup lines! Actually, I really should get religious. If I were religious, I could celebrate an end-of-the-world day every day!
Can one of you physicists tell me how 4.5 Kelvin is different from 2 Kelvin, operationally?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Really. What is the worst thing that could happen when a large oil cooled transformer fails?
Now, accelerating a proton to the speed of light seems to me impossible, given that they are in a vacuum.
I'm not a physicist but I do read some of the layman cosmology and theoretical physics books when I can so maybe I'm still missing something but exactly why does that seem impossible? Having a vacuum actually makes it easier due to no wind resistance if we were talking about an object big enough for wind resistance to matter. They are using magnets to accelerate the particles so I'm not getting why you are questioning the possibility of what they did. Unfortunately no one else questioned you yet for me to share in your answer with them so I had to be the first to ask.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
The summary authors don't seem to understand. Nobody at CERN reported the malfunction? I assume they mean "reported to the press" -- otherwise, how did they fix a 30-ton transistor without telling anyone.
Anyway, things malfunction and break on particle accelerators constantly. They're devilishly difficult to maintain properly. (They operate in extreme fail-safe modes, so failures harmless but common.)
Well, most are. When I was working at the (then SERC) Daresbury Nuclear Structure Facility, we were basically sitting under a really big tank of SF6 (Sulpher Hexafluoride) which is not stuff you want to be breathing. It's not poisonous. It doesn't do much other than sit there and be really really inert, but that makes it a superb gas for accelerators. It also makes it hard to detect and really bad for oxygen-breathing lifeforms. But, yes, things would go wrong all the time with that, and it was a child's toy compared to the LHC - in terms of power (Darebury's tandem accelerator was a puny 20 MeV), technology, scale, rarity/availability of skills, innovativeness, etc. Not only did things go wrong, but it routinely arced. If you thought a Van De Graaf generator or a Tesla Coil was impressive, you've never seen an accelerator when the insulating gas fails. However, another thing to consider is the European attitude to emergencies. I got to see the operators of the facility during an SF6 leak. Those guys weren't casual by any means but they kept their cool better than most refrigerators. Working their way through the emergency drills methodically and and calmly. And that was a potentially life-threatening emergency. A mere transformer?! Pah. Bet the only ones who even flinched were the accountants. The main scientists weren't expecting to run experiments for a while yet, as it wasn't even considered as burned-in. If the news channels thought this was significant, they've clearly never visited a laboratory after high-school and skipped classes there.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Fermi has built or been involved in the design of the magnets for basically ALL of the large colliders worldwide. LEP, LHC, SSC, RHIC, Tevatron (obviously), etc all had significant contributions by Fermi. The fact that every design review missed it was simply amazing. Luckily they were able to come up with a way to fix the surviving magnets and fairly quickly built replacements for the destroyed units.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The used superconductors are good well above 4K (although with decreased maximum saturation).
The main point is that they want their helium to be superfluidic, as otherwise it would be impossible to direct the heat over the many km needed (if their were bubble formation in the dewars).
With superfluidic helium, heat resistance also drops nearly to zero(as we are in the real world, it cannot be zero. But heat conductivity increases by many magnitudes, and bubble formation is eliminated). That way, they can keep heat gradients along the whole ring well below 1K.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
The current status of the beam can always be viewed here
Which currently says "We just had a major quench in sector 34. More news as we get it"
IIRC a quench (loss of superconductivity because of the magnetic fields) is likely to cause extra damage, so this sounds a lot more important than a simple transformer failure. Plus therer might be design issues that caused it.
Good luck to the LHC team. I guess this is how a real beta goes