ABB Industrial Robots Weld Big Bang Accelerator

The Large Hadron Col­lid­er (LHC) is the biggest and most sophis­ti­cat­ed par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tor ever made. It took 20 years, $10 bil­lion dol­lars, 10,000 sci­en­tists, and sur­pris­ing­ly enough, two stan­dard indus­tri­al robots to build.

The sci­en­tists could have cre­at­ed a high-tech spe­cial­ized machine to do the work, but they decid­ed the ABB IRB 140 indus­tri­al robot was up to the chal­lenge. Two ABB IRB 140 robots were cho­sen to weld the stain­less steel alloy tub­ing assem­blies that make up the LHC’s two accel­er­a­tor rings.

The LHC’s pur­pose is to smash togeth­er two par­ti­cles mov­ing at 99.99% the speed of light. This huge par­ti­cle physics exper­i­ment sim­u­lates the state of things right after the Big Bang occurred. It is locat­ed under­ground at the Swiss-French border.

The LHC weld­ing job required incred­i­ble pre­ci­sion and repeata­bil­i­ty. The two 6‑axis robots per­formed 54 mil­lion laser welds — some as small as 30 microns in diam­e­ter spaced 10 – 15 microns apart. Each tub­ing assem­bly is 15 – 18 meters long and the two rings are each 27 kilo­me­ters long. Laser weld­ing was cho­sen to help main­tain the strin­gent parameters. 

These par­tic­u­lar 6‑axis ABB robots offer 5kg pay­loads, incred­i­ble flex­i­bil­i­ty, and a hor­i­zon­tal reach of 810mm. For the LHC project each IRB 140 robots were placed on a lin­ear tracks. They were mon­i­tored via CCTV and per­formed the laser welds with Luxs­tar 100WND: YAG laser weld­ing guns.

The con­trollers for the two ABB indus­tri­al robots were linked with stan­dard ABB soft­ware. ABB’s World Zone soft­ware was also used to coor­di­nate the two robots — mak­ing sure they did­n’t collide.

The rig­or­ous LHC appli­ca­tion demon­strates the capa­bil­i­ties of the ABB IRB 140 robot. Inter­est­ed in an ABB indus­tri­al robot? Browse Robots​.com’ col­lec­tion or call the sales depart­ment online or at 877−762−6881.