Mechanical Analysis of the Collaring Process of the 11 T Dipole Magnet

As part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator upgrades foreseen by the high luminosity-LHC project, the CERN 11 T program is aimed at replacing standard LHC Nb–Ti main dipole magnets, operating with a bore field of 8.3 T, with pairs of shorter Nb3Sn dipole magnets with a bore field of 11 T and the same total integrated field, thus providing space for additional collimators in the dispersion suppressor region. At the time of the submission of this paper, six single-aperture and two double-aperture short models have been fabricated and tested. As a result of a degraded quench performance observed in some of the short models, attributed to excessive stress on the Nb3Sn coil mid-planes, a thorough investigation of the room temperature loading procedure, and in particular of the collaring process, has been launched. A 150-mm-long collared coil mockup, instrumented with strain gauges and pressure sensitive films, has been used to study the peak stresses experienced by the brittle and strain sensitive Nb3Sn cables in the different phases of the collaring and as a function of coils’ size and collaring force. In this paper, the results of the test campaign are described.