CERN Uses Numerical Simulation to Prevent Quenches in the LHC

Lorenzo Bortot, CERN, Switzerland

Engineers and physicists at CERN go to great lengths to ensure that the high-power superconducting magnets that maintain the circular trajectory of particles inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) do not revert to a resistive state, an event known as a quench. To understand and prevent quench events, Lorenzo Bortot, an electrical engineer and research fellow at CERN, used numerical simulation to develop a multiphysics, multiscale, and multirate representation of the electrodynamics and thermal evolution of a quench event.