A team of researchers of Instituto ai2-UPV recently visited the facilities of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). They will co-operate with CERN to optimize the power supply of the Future Circular Collider (FCC).

The FCC will reach energy levels significantly above its predecessor, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), which is biggest particle accelerator built to date, with a circumference of 27 kilometers and more than 9,000 superconducting magnets, built with the collaboration of 60 countries and a great use to produce both scientific results and new computer and industrial technologies. The FCC will operate for several decades and will extend the circumference of the LHC to 100 kilometers. This will require a larger power supply to carry out the physics experiments and CERN is working together with the experts of the Instituto ai2-UPV, studying different alternatives for the FCC power supply.

The aim of the project is optimizing the energy consumption of the FCC, and increase the robustness of the power supply, in order to prevent transients in the French and Swiss electrical grid to distort the trajectory of the beam and thus force the researchers to stop physics experiments, as restarting these experiments can take relatively long time,” explains Ramón Blasco, researcher of the Instituto ai2-UPV participating in this project.

“Moreover, it is highly important that the underground facilities are as compact as possible, in order to reduce civil engineering costs, and modular to allow for easy maintenance and repair”. The use of High and Medium Voltage Direct Current will be assessed in the feasibility studies to achieve these goals.

“Our group has a wide experience working on HVDC/MVDC and the CERN is analyzing the feasibility of these technologies for the FCC”, explains Blasco.

The collaboration with CERN will be carried out by means of a joint industrial PhD done by Manuel Colmenero and co-directed by the CERN researcher Francisco Blánquez.