Impact of coil deformations on field quality in the Large Hadron Collider main dipole

In superconducting accelerator magnets the coils are usually pre-stressed in order to avoid conductor movements induced by electro-magnetic forces. In this paper we use a finite element mechanical model of the main LHC dipole to evaluate the coil deformations determined by the pre-stress and their impact on magnetic field quality. The model explains the origin of the offsets between the nominal multipole values and those measured at room temperature in prototype and pre-series dipole magnets. We also present an experiment carried out to analyze the impact on field quality and coil stresses of coil azimuthal spacers (pole shims). A 1 m long dipole collared coil has been re-assembled several times with pole shims of different thickness and the field components have been measured each time. Experimental data are compared to numerical computations based on the mechanical model. One finds that variations of shim thickness induce not only a change of the azimuthal coil length, but also a different pattern in coil deformations. A good agreement is found between measurements and simulations.