Experience with LHC Magnets from Prototyping to Large Scale Industrial Production and Integration

The construction of the LHC superconducting magnets is approaching its half way to completion. At the end of 2003, main dipoles cold masses for more than one octant were delivered; meanwhile the winding for the second octant was almost completed. The other large magnets, like the main quadrupoles and the insertion quadrupoles, have entered into series production as well. Providing more than 20 km of superconducting magnets, with the quality required for an accelerator like LHC, is an unprecedented challenge in term of complexity that has required many steps from the construction of 1 meterlong magnets in the laboratory to today’s production of more than one 15 meter-long magnet per day in Industry. The work and its organization is made even more complex by the fact that CERN supplies most of the critical components and part of the main tooling to the magnet manufacturers, both for cost reduction and for quality issues. In this paper the critical aspects of the construction will be reviewed and the actual achievements in term of quality and construction time will be compared with the expectations. The main result, the evidence of being able to meet the LHC schedule planned two years ago, as well as the efforts that are still needed to stick to it without loosing in quality will be discussed.