3 ms·
The article briefly mentions the large amount of energy stored in the collider beams. In the LHC, "each unimpeded beam is capable of melting a 500-kilogram blo
by idlewords 11y ago
The article briefly mentions the large amount of energy stored in the collider beams. In the LHC, "each unimpeded beam is capable of melting a 500-kilogram block of copper." This energy has to be dissipated in a few microseconds if something goes wrong in the collider. For the LHC, the solution is to heat a huge graphite cylinder to over 700 C.
Not as cool as a black hole, but a pretty neat engineering challenge.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/cern-to-start-up-the-large-hadron-collider-now-heres-how-it-plans-to-stop-it http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/cern-to-star...
- SeanDav 11y agoVery interesting - I wonder why they did not choose to run the beam through water to dissipate energy?
- SamReidHughes 11y agoDo you mean steam?
- jepler 11y agoGraphite stays solid at standard pressure up to 3900K (source: wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon) so you get ~3600K of ΔT from standard temperature of ~300K before you have to deal with a liquid or gas. Coupled with being denser than water (but having lower specific heat than liquid or solid water), my napkin is telling me you get about 10x the heat capacity in J/m³ with graphite instead of water.
- idlewords 11y agoThere's a technical discussion of using graphite vs. aluminum vs. copper in this paper: http://flash.desy.de/sites2009/site_vuvfel/content/e403/e1642/e1132/e1129/infoboxContent1791/fel2006-05.pdf http://flash.desy.de/sites2009/site_vuvfel/content/e403/e164... And a comparison of graphite vs. water schemes here: http://tesla.desy.de/new_pages/TESLA_Reports/2001/pdf_files/tesla2001-04.pdf http://tesla.desy.de/new_pages/TESLA_Reports/2001/pdf_files/...
- SeanDav 11y agoThanks for the links. I note that the graphite vs water scheme paper actually concludes that water cooling would be the preferred method.
- deelowe 11y agoYou'd need a pretty serious pressure vessel. I think time is a factor here.