Goodbye ESRF girders
On 10 December 2018, Europe’s leading x-ray source was shut down for a 20-month upgrade that will boost the brightness of its beams by a factor of 100. In spite of this 20-month shutdown, ESRF’s engineers and technicians have no time to relax.
The new source, the Extremely Brilliant Source (EBS) – the first high-energy fourth-generation synchrotron light source -, will come to life by replacing the existing storage ring, a double-bend achromat (DBA) magnet sequence, with an innovative and award-winning hybrid multi-bend achromat (HMBA) design, developed at the ESRF.
Teams have now three months to dismantle the historic storage ring – the first third-generation in the world -, which has been serving the international scientific community for the last 25 years. Three months to get the tunnel ready for the installation of the EBS new storage ring.
More than 1720 tons of material will be removed in 11 weeks; 160 girders will be lifted out from the tunnel by using one of the three huge cranes; 200km of cables and 6000m of pipes will be disconnected and taken out.
Once this is finished, from April 2019, the teams will have eight months to install the 32 new arcs for the EBS storage ring. These arcs wil be made up of 128 EBS girders, which will support over 10 000 components that will be aligned with a precision to half the width of a human hair.
EBS represents an enormous challenge, not only in pushing science and technology to its known limits, but also on a human and logistical scale. “Today, the EBS project is officially entering a new stage.” said Francesco Sette, Director General of the ESRF. “ The expertise that we have at the ESRF is unique and allows us to attempt a project of this scale. Today all the ESRF teams are mobilised to make this vision a reality in 2020,” added Pantaleo Raimondi, EBS Project Leader, and Director of the Accelerator & Source Division.
