CERN Engineers Have to Identify and Disconnect 9,000 Obsolete Cables

quote:

---

CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider, has grand plans to update the world’s largest particle accelerator complex in the next few years. But engineers have identified a barrier to the upgrade: there’s no space for new cables in the injectors that accelerate particles before they enter the LHC.

In the past, when parts of the accelerators have been upgraded or added to, engineers would often additionally replace the cables that connected them. In the process, they would leave in place the old cables that were no longer in use. Now, a heap of obsolete cables are blocking the way to install new ones needed for the accelerator’s next big upgrade. To make space, CERN engineers have set out to identify and remove the old, unused cables. All 9,000 of them.

Telling apart functioning and out-of-use cables in one of the world’s biggest and most expensive experiments is a high-stakes game. Pull out the wrong cable, and at best you might have lost some data monitoring capabilities. Worst case scenario, you might yank out a crucial safety cable and the accelerator simply won’t work. “That’s why it’s so tricky to complete this operation—because any mistake could start major trouble at the restart of the accelerator,” Sébastien Evrard, the mechanical engineer leading the clean-up project, told me.

LINK

---