A US student has designed massive storage stands that are capable of supporting up to 45,000 pounds of superconducting magnets for the world’s first electron-ion collider (EIC).

The four-tier stands were created by Robert Desjardins, a mechanical engineering technology senior at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and his mentor, EIC mechanical engineer Jonathon Greene. The structures will store superconducting magnets from Brookhaven National Laboratory’s (BNL) Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).

About 80 magnets are set to be removed from the RHIC. They will require storage during the transition to the EIC. Some of the equipment could later be reused as spares for the new machine.

According to the team, individual magnets can weigh as much as 12,000 pounds. With warehouse floor space limited, the engineers instead decided to go vertical. “Floor space is at a premium,” Greene said. “So, build up instead of build out.”

The team had been storing the magnets on three-tier stands where ceiling space was limited. The new design, in contrast, will increase that to four levels. It is also strong enough to safely support the enormous loads. “That’s what these stands are for,” Greene explained. “We have so many magnets that we need to store.”

Adding a fourth level, however, required updating a design dating back decades. Desjardins began redesigning the structure during his DOE summer internship at the facility. He worked from a design that was documented in hand-drawn plans dating back to the 1990s.

“One of the challenges was just getting the cost down but also beefing the stands up to make them strong enough to hold four magnets ,” Desjardins explained.

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