Tthe 5 axis CNC high-power machining centre C 42 U installed at the CERN Department MME, dynamic, equipped with Precision packages I and II for highly-precise, reproducibly exact quality machining within tolerances of +/-0.5 µm

Whenever it comes to international research on the basis of physics, the name CERN is mentioned automatically. This European Organisation for Nuclear Research is based in Meyrin in the Swiss Canton of Geneva and is a massive research facility with more than 3200 employees. With the help of so-called particle accelerators, the construction of matter is researched. Founded in 1954, CERN has 21 member states today. More than 11000 international guest scientists from more than 85 countries work on experiments at CERN every year - this means that there is a whole series of technical and administrative prerequisites that have to be fulfilled and maintained. The largest (at the moment) and best known particle accelerator is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which was taken into operation in the year 2008. The LHC is 27 km long and consists, viewed soberly, of a massive number of mechanical and electronic components. The special thing about the accelerator is its 9178 supra-conductive magnets with lengths of up to 15 m. These magnets are required to hold the particle stream on course before they are brought to collision during the experiments. There are four collision points in the LHC at which, with the help of massive detectors, the resulting substructure of particles is investigated during the collision.


After the first intensive LHC operational phase (2010 - 2013), there was a two-year long intensive period of maintenance. Besides numerous optimisations, this concerned mainly the 10700 electrical connections between the supra-conductive dipole and quadrupole magnets. These sustainable improvements made it possible for the LHC to go into "Restart" in April 2015.


For the maintenance and repair phases within the 26659 m long tunnel, a large number of components were newly developed and, consequently, manufactured in the high numbers required. The manufacturing process takes place under application of extremely high precision and quality standards developed within the "Engineering Department" of CERN, by the "Mechanical & Materials Engineering Group" (MME), with its 175 employees, who are responsible for this task. These are allocated to technical workshops, one of which is concerned with the manufacture of prototypes and samples as well as the development of machining processes.

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