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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."
I would be so tempted to just drive by datacenters wiping all their data. It probably wouldnt work BUT I CAN DREAM CANT I!
FTA: "The Muon g-2 ring, an electromagnet made of steel and aluminum, begins its 3,200-mile trek from New York in early June. From there, it will sail by barge down the East Coast, around Florida's tip into the Gulf of Mexico, then up the Mississippi River until it arrives in Illinois."
I would imagine bridge clearances and weight limits on bridges would be at least 2 of the issues leading to the path chosen. (others would be things like permits, powerlines etc)
Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning
Maglev train, of course!
It would be way too complex, logistically, to have it shipped by road directly. It pretty much blocks one direction of traffic on a divided highway. It will travel probably a 100 miles or so over land, and the rest by barge - down the east coast, and up the Mississippi River.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
UPS and lots of bubble wrap!
Apparently tipping it more than a few degrees causes permanent damage. If you have to detour around very small hills, you might have to detour a very long way.
Like most hung things, it is easier to take via water, even if the ground sea distance is much greater than a straight line approach.
The majority of the trip will be via barge.
Here's an Idea, why not move the Scientists? Greyhound bus.
Or telecommute?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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?
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.
It's going by barge for most of the journey. From the article: "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."
I got the barge part, but the Mississippi part was buried a bit further. I pictured a trip across the Great Lakes. Don't they know about the Erie Canal?
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
Basically they are moving the instrument to a facility that can make a better stream of particles to steer into it.
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Here's an Idea, why not move the Scientists? Greyhound bus.
Or telecommute?
They need to get *muons* into the ring, not the scientists. And Muons only survive on their own for 2 microseconds so even telecommuting is out of the question.
We usually prefer airplanes to buses (lots cheaper, given the time value of money.....)
The cost of running the experiment again at Brookhaven (which had been our initial idea) would be significantly higher than moving it to Fermilab, because of the cost of required accelerator upgrades at Brookhaven. Fermilab has protons to spare, and the experiment fits into the larger muon program at the Lab. http://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/experiments/intensity/
As I mentioned up above, it turns out to be loads cheaper to move the experiment to Fermilab than to upgrade the accelerator complex at Brookhaven to do the experiment there.
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.
I think most couriers/handlers see "fragile" more as a challenge than as a warning. You know, see how far it can bend before it will break, that kind of thing.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Up to the st Lawrence and it can dock in Chicago. That would actually be shorter and faster than the Mississippi As the river and locks would slow things down out on the great lakes themselves they can get up to full speed.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
>> 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
Why didn't they barge this through the Great Lakes instead of up the Mississippi? The only reason occurs to me is perhaps some spots on the Chicago River might have been too narrow where it passes under bridges, but even that seems unlikely.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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.
It could be a Bitter electromagnet, which are constructed from thin disks of porous copper.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
They're moving the magnet to a particle accelerator. It's already at one, and it generated some interesting findings, but the particle accelerator it's currently at is too weak to give a margin of error low enough to safely call it a discovery.
Thus, they're moving it to a more powerful accelerator, since moving the accelerator to it is not exactly an option.
They're sure going to feel silly when they realise how easy it really was all along. Especially if they ever find out that some guy from the internet beat them to the punch on such an obvious idea.
Both routes were considered, but I'm not sure why one was chosen over the other. Presumably input from the companies bidding on the contract had something to do with it.
Well, we might be idiots, but that's not the problem. It's a set of three very large superconducting coils, custom wound on-site in the 1990s, built into cryostats that can't be disassembled, and being moved as a set of monolithic units. They were never designed or intended to be moved, and significant engineering work has gone into determining the mechanical loads they can be safely subjected to.
Due to the aforementioned tilting problem, the North Atlantic is a bad idea. Too many swells. Going south allows them to use the Intracoastal Waterways
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
For starters, this thing weighs 600 tons. It would have to cross hundreds of bridges, most of which are probably not rated for 600 tons. And of course it is much wider than normal travel lanes and would move very slowly, creating a traffic nightmare. Then there is the can`t tilt more than a few degrees, which would make crossing mountains kind of hard.
That's just a cover story. They're really moving the Stargate.
If you read the article, it says that shipping is 1/50 of the cost of building a new one.
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.
As sibling says, bridges and hills are a problem. Major waterways are generally constructed so that bridges are either really high (as in 30ft+) or have some part that can be opened.
Anything that fits on a truck is easy to transport over land, but stuff that is significantly larger and can't be moved in parts is difficult over land. On the water, major ports and waterways are pretty wide. For example, the coast pilot linked a boatnerd.com [1] (who doesn't love that url) says for the mississipi - illinois waterway connection:
(10) Mississippi River-Illinois Waterway-
(11) depth, 9 feet (2.7);
(12) width, 80 feet (24.38 meters);
(13) length, 600 feet (182.88 meters);
(14) vertical clearance 17 feet (5.18 meters);
So, you can transport something that is roughly 20x150 meters. Some random internet site [2] says that "The standard barge is 195 feet long, 35 feet wide, and can be used to a 9-foot draft. Its capacity is 1500 tons. Some of the newer barges today are 290 feet by 50 feet, double the capacity of earlier barges." So, if we get one of them "newer barges', we can transport something that is 75 x 15 meters and weighs 3000 tonnes using equipment that is standard on the infrastructure.
A random wiki quote [3] says that "In the United States, 80,000 pounds (36,287 kg) is the maximum allowable legal gross vehicle weight without a permit.". So, with standard equipment you can transport something on the ground up to 36 metric tons, or about 0.1 percent of what fits on the barge*. Of course, you *can* transport something bigger than that, but then you get into serious logistic operations with special equipment, road closures, etc etc, while the barge can just be loaded up and sail away.
tl;dr: roads are made for fast and flexible transportation of relatively small amounts of cargo; shipping is made for slow transportation of bulk and large items.
[1] http://www.boatnerd.com/facts-figures/cpgreat.htm
[2] http://www.caria.org/barges_tugboats.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-trailer_truck
*) I'm totally ignoring any possible short tonne, long tonne, metric tonne etc errors here, since that won't make a dent into a 3 orders of magnitude difference...
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.
It is a lot easier to move 600 tons by barge than by land. The size and weight makes it impossible to go over bridges and most roads. Not only is the weight highly concentrated, 1.2 million pounds for the magnet and probably another 300,000+ for the modular platform trailers & tractor but the width is nearly 50 feet. At that weight your speed is severely limited, always below 5 mph and you are limited to moving at night only. From the map, I would guess it might make its way south on floyd then onto a barge in the bay. I don't see how they could get it anywhere on the north shore unless they go up floyd to 25 and take lilco rd to use the docks at the power station (if it fits up those roads). From there its an easy trip on water. No bridges, narrow roads or worries about weight. Its open water until the Mississippi.
You also have to take into account the cost and process to apply for permits. You have to plan the route in advance and have it approved by the DOT. By law you need a police escort for a load that large in NY, more money. Imagine planning a route for hundreds of miles involving police escorts, road closures, moving only at night, slow speeds and having to deal with routing around bridges (if possible) and maybe needing to reinforce bridges/overpasses. It can and has been done many times but its costly and time consuming. It can take upward of a year or more to plan a move that big.
Because there is a lot of very, very expensive equipment at Fermilab already. As big of a deal as this thing is, the stuff that is already there is far more pricey and extensive. Physicists are easy to move; their equipment isn't.
I'd not be surprised if they were using the Gimbaldi family. They do a good job actually and move a lot of the more famous things. They have some neat rigs and custom moving equipment that they've developed over the years.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Well, we might be idiots, but that's not the problem. It's a set of three very large superconducting coils, custom wound on-site in the 1990s, built into cryostats that can't be disassembled, and being moved as a set of monolithic units. They were never designed or intended to be moved, and significant engineering work has gone into determining the mechanical loads they can be safely subjected to.
How much would it cost to build another one at say, Fermilab?
Here's a hint: that information is in the article.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I imagine calm sea waves don't actually do much to a large barge with 600 tons on it.
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"
Get a hobbit to do it. Its the only way.
Have gnu, will travel.
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I asked the head of Emmert (the shipping company) this question a few weeks ago. From that brief conversation, it is my understanding that the Southern/Mississippi route was chosen despite the longer distance for safety reasons, which is the primary concern. The claim was that they could hug the coast and pull into safe harbor in the event of inclement conditions, while the Northern route up the St. Lawrence, etc. has stretches where the barge would not have that option and was, therefore, riskier.