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Transporting a 15-Meter-Wide, 600-Ton Magnet Cross Country
necro81 writes "Although its Tevatron particle accelerator has gone dark, Fermi Laboratory outside Chicago is still doing physics. A new experiment, called muon g-2 will investigate quantum mechanical behavior of the electron's heavier sibling: the muon. Fermi needs a large ring chamber to store the muons it produces and investigates, and it just so happens that Brookhaven National Laboratory outside NYC has one to spare. But how do you transport a delicate, 15-m diameter, 600-ton superconducting magnet halfway across the country? Very carefully."
They're magic!
I would be so tempted to just drive by datacenters wiping all their data. It probably wouldnt work BUT I CAN DREAM CANT I!
Brookhaven to Batavia is only about 1000 miles by even a lax road route. Where the heck is this thing going, on a national tour? The web site claims it will travel 3,200 miles. Is it going to spring break first?
It's just that You Can't Explain That.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Maglev train, of course!
UPS and lots of bubble wrap!
3200 miles? Boat around florida and up the mississippi.
By using another 600-ton magnet, flipped around, of course.
(Too soon??)
Cover the thing with a tarp, and you've got a mysterious huge disc-shaped object being trucked around escorted by police... Can't wait to see the alien conspiracy sites light up!
I hope they pull this off.
I look forward to an age where couriers can actually be relied upon to deliver such goods without subjecting them to g forces beyond what their structural integrity can withstand.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
By the time it arrived I wonder if it was covered in bits of wire, steel cans, bikes. screws and other random bits of iron.
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
This would have made for an awesome episode of "Shipping Wars".
It's not a magnet, it's an electromagnet, which just makes it a large and sensitive piece of equipment rather than a big magnet.
When I saw the headline and summary, I thought they were going to have to take special precautions to stay away from metals and other materials that could be affected by the huge magnet.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to move the people and the money? 90% of the time the people involved don't even have to be near the machine, with this newfangled internet thing that some people invented...
It's a big electro magnet. Why can tilting it a couple of degrees break it?
The article doesn't say as far as I can tell, so I can only assume it's because it was built from crappy parts, or assembled by idiots.
That? Oh, that's a, err, pizza!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I was BNH(ell) when the g-2 magnet was first installed. I wonder if the FNAL part of the magnets life will be as inconclusive as it has been so far.
can you knock out the ez-pass scanners with this?
>> The trip will be tense, because the ring’s massive electromagnet cannot tilt or twist more than a few degrees, or the wiring inside will be irreparably damaged. It will float from New York Harbor in June, down the East Coast, around Florida, up the Gulf Coast and up the Mississippi River by July.
That seems rather risky. Most ships would at one point or another tilt more than a few degrees to either side due to .. waves. No mention on if this is a gyro-stabilized barge perhaps...
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Wouldn't it be much shorter all around to go by the Saint Lawrence Seaway? Shorter on the water and shorter distance in Illinois???
I know I'm stupid but, it seems to me that anything that big and that delicate should be built in situ.
It can't twist more than a few degrees and they're going to put it on a rolling barge for almost a month. What could possibly go wrong?
It's not really that tough a job. The thing is about 4 lanes wide, and not excessively tall. There's less than 20 miles of road movement at each end of the trip. So it's going to be a routine big move with brief road closures. Probably late at night.
The rest of the trip is by barge, down the East Coast, around Florida, and up the Mississippi, Illinois, and DesPlanes rivers to Chicago. There are standard barges which can easily handle something of that size. The locks on that route have 110 foot width.
That's just a cover story. They're really moving the Stargate.
If you turn it on, you should be able to just pull it along behind a train, assuming the tracks could be electrified as needed (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev for details if necessary).
Then again, if this "superconductor" really has super powers as its name implies, it should be able to fly.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Makes you wonder what's wrong with the Great Lakes route which is presumably much shorter.
And Muons only survive on their own for 2 microseconds
That's easy to fix - boost them to ~260 GeV and they will last long enough to make a 1,600 km journey. It's the 1,600 km of vacuum pipe and focussing magnets that is the real problem.
How do they transport?
I remember back in Elementary school watching the Hale telescope mirror movie. One of those old 16mm, rainy day, hell the teacher has to have a cigarette break flicks? Old black and white footage is available here: http://archive.org/details/capsca_00001
Anyway, when they shipped the blank out to Caltech by Train it was put in a steel case. The Blank was then polished at Caltech to make the 200" mirror for the telescope and that was shipped via truck to Palomar Mountain. Anyway, they put it in a special casing for shipment and when they arrived at Palomar, they found bullet holes in the casing. Even back then, the local Luddites just wanted to spoil the fun. Anyway, my point is here that if they could ship a 200 inch mirror in the early part of the 20th century, they should be able to easily transport a 15mm magnet that's hollow in the middle.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
15 meters = 49.2 feet. Not everyone uses meters.
The article mentions muons traveling at the speed of light. I think it's important to discern that they are moving /close/ to the speed of light, but not at the speed of light.
Sig: I stole this sig.
re: Like most hung things,...it is easier to take via water...
There's a joke there, but I'm not touching it.
.
That's what she said!
Oh wait, I done goofed on myself if I were a guy. I musta got that joke meme wrong somehow... ;>)
Get a hobbit to do it. Its the only way.
Have gnu, will travel.
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Hmm... it may be possible to create an electromagnet run off a mobile power supply that would put North to North or South to South so that the magnet would levitate off a surface and ride smoothly. Depends on configuration of the magnet though.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Has anyone considered how many scouts will go missing because of this?
Just to clear up a misconception in the original posting and a number of the comments above, the coils being transported do not weigh 600 tons. They are closer to 6 tons. The entire super-ferric magnet weighs 600 tons, but most of that mass is in the iron return yoke, which has been disassembled and (probably) already trucked piecemeal to Fermilab. The transport problem for the superconducting coils and cryostat has never been one of weight, only size and tolerance to mechanical stress. In fact, at one point, the group had explored the possibility of transporting the coils part of the way by Sikorsky helicopter (see http://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=22567) but the ground clearance restrictions were not practicable. Also, it probably would have looked way too much like a UFO.