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To: LibWhacker
These things are incredibly finicky. I've used a lot of apparatus in my career, accelerators, reactors, NMR, laser ablation, mass spec, et al. Of them all, accelerators gave me the most headaches for things going wrong at the worst times.
31 posted on 11/06/2009 5:21:25 AM PST by chimera
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To: chimera

You are right. Accelerators are probably the most challenging machines ever built by man, incluing reactors and moon-rockets and war machines.

I could give people here some some comparisons to give ideas of what type of vacuum, electronic, remote controls, magnet, heat loading, mechanical specifications, plumbing, monitoring, electrical stability, safety interlocks, number of components and miles of wire, massive computer programming, materials, radiation damages, etc.

However, I’ll limit to two examples:

The heat loading on components we had to deal with at the accelerator I worked at ranged up to 100watts/sq.mm. (Have you ever burned yourself on the 30,000mm3 surface of a 100watt light bulb?-— imagine having to deal with heat loading 30,000 times that heat.). Fortunately, most areas the heat loading was much more managable.

Second: the vacuums needed require that each and every joint and weld in these machine pass “leak tests” so stringent that it would take over 1000 years for a liter of air to make its way through the joint. A single fingerprint on the inner wall will corrupt the vacuum such that the machine would be useless for six months while it evaporates. The vacuum pumps used to maintain the vacuum can’t even be turned on until the pressure is one-ten-millionth of an Earth’s atmosphere.


34 posted on 11/06/2009 3:10:49 PM PST by AFPhys ((Praying for our troops, our citizens, that the Bible and Freedom become basis of the US law again))
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