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“I attended the Beijing Institute of Technology to study
mechanical engineering at the age of 16. As soon as I graduated,
I started teaching in the same university for 4 years. In 1996,
I got an opportunity to join the French Alternative Energies
and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), working in the Institute
of Research into the Fundamental Laws of the Universe (IRFU),
on the conception and construction of the Large Hadron Collider
(LHC). This accelerator integrates four main experiments
using detecors to analyze the myriad of particles produced by
collisions.(The LHC is the largest particle accelerator. It lies
in a tunnel of 27 kilometers in circumference, over 100 meters
deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border). This accelerator integrates
four main experiments using detectors to analyze the myriad of
particles produced by collisions. ATLAS is one of these four
detectors. We worked for 10 years on the realization of the ATLAS
Barrel Toroid - the world’s largest superconducting magnet
ever built. I was in charge of the mechanical design of the structure
supporting the magnet and the ATLAS detector. Having a total
weight of 1400 tons, the structure had to withstand very strong
magnetic forces whilst the allowable deformation of the structure
was extremely small.
Atlas had
to support 8 superconducting coils each weighing 100 tons
that had to be all aligned to millimetric accuracy. The material
used for the structure also had to be minimized and the design
optimization was made through extensive numerical simulations.
With a height of the structure equivalent to a building of five
floors, it was not possible to make any full-scale, global prototype,
everything relied on the precision of the simulation and the
accuracy of each component of the assembly. We became experts
in the field of superconducting magnet mechanical design. I was
then appointed to lead the mechanical design of a new superconducting
magnet for the Fair, which is an accelerator under construction
at Darmstadt, Germany.”
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