Cooldown and Warmup Studies for the Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently under construction at CERN, will make use of superconducting magnets operating in superfluid helium below 2 K. The LHC ring is divided in 8 sectors, each of them cooled by a refrigerator of 18 kW at 4.5 K equivalent cooling power. For the cooldown and warmup of a 3.3 km long LHC sector, the flow available above 80 K per refrigerator is 770 g/s and the cor responding capacity is 600 kW. This paper presents the results of cooldown and warmup simulations, as concerns time delays, temperature difference across magnets, available power and flow-rates, and estimates of energy and liquid nitrogen consumption.