Performance of Five and Six Block Coil Geometries in Short Superconducting Dipole Models for the LHC

A series of similar one meter long superconducting dipole models for the LHC is being manufactured and tested since 1995 for exploring design variants and assembly parameters.Until the end of 1997 all magnets of this series were based on a coil geometry subdividing the conductors in five distinctive winding blocks. In order to cope with new requirements of magnetic field distribution and coil design flexibility, one additional block has been added in the beginning of 1998. A significant number of models of both types have been built and tested, some of them re-built in a different version, adding up in more than 40 models tested so far. The paper reviews the performance of these two different coil designs in terms of manufacture, training behaviour and temperature margins as well as mechanical behaviour and magnetic field quality.