Cryogenic Heat Load and Refrigeration Capacity Management at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a 26.7 km high-energy proton and ion collider based on several thousand high-field superconducting magnets operating in superfluid helium below 2 K, now under commissioning at CERN. After a decade of development of the key technologies, the project was approved for construction in 1994 and the industrial procurement for the cryogenic system launched in 1997, concurrently with the completion of the R&D program. This imposed to base the sizing of the refrigeration plants on estimated and partially measured values of static and dynamic heat loads, with adequate uncertainty and overcapacity coefficients to cope with unknowns in machine configuration and in physical processes at work. With the cryogenic commissioning of the complete machine, full-scale static heat loads could be measured, thus confirming the correctness of the estimates and the validity of the approach, and safeguarding excess refrigeration capacity for absorbing the beam-induced dynamic loads. The methodology is applicable to other large cryogenic projects such as ITER or the International Linear Collider (ILC).