download all articles
send via email
Industry benefits from search for the secrets of matter at CERN
Industry can benefit from collaborating with researchers working at the cutting edge of science, but it isn't always easy.
That's the conclusion of a discussion held between leading administrators and senior scientists at European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) and EIRMA. It was held at CERN's Geneva headquarters in May, as part of the 2008 EIRMA annual conference.
Max Metzger, secretary general of CERN, said: “As we build extremely innovative machines we need components that are simply not available in the market. We need joint developments between industry and CERN. Industry alone cannot do it and CERN is not strong enough to do it.”
The organisation is currently bringing the Large Hadron Collider online, and hopes to start using it for experimentation by July of this year. The collider has been built to find evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle that current theories predict will explain why things have mass. This is a severe test of the standard model of physics, our best description yet of the way much of nature works.
Other experiments will use the collider to investigate why we cannot sense 96% of the mass of the universe, the so-called missing mass, the nature of black holes, and perhaps whether we live in a 4, 11 or 26 dimensional universe.
“The potential of these experiments is very large, but if nature is not kind to us we might find nothing or next to nothing,” said Prof Jos Engelen, chief scientific officer and deputy director, CERN. “But that in itself will be very revealing for physics.”
Big science
It's heady stuff, matched by equally impressive engineering. Only one in 1013 of the very high energy collisions created in the collider is expected to produce a Higgs boson. Since the maximum collision energy of a ring accelerator is controlled by its diameter (limited in Geneva by the Jura mountains on one side and the lake on the other) and the strength of the beam-forming magnets, CERN is using superconducting magnet coils. To do so it has to chill 33,000 tonnes of equipment to 1.9 Kelvin, using 500,000 litres of superfluid helium, itself a major engineering feat.
The data processing challenge is also immense. The collider will produce one billion collisions each second, each generating between 100 and 1000 decay particles. Algorithms in the particle detectors will select 150 of the most promising events per second for further analysis, rejecting the rest and creating a torrent of between 10,000 and 15,000Tbyte of data a year. These data will be sent for processing by the international scientific community via a network of computers - so-called grid computing.
The collider alone is expected to cost €2.2bn, with over half of that spent on the superconducting magnets. The whole project, including running costs, salaries and the equipment for each of the collider experiments, will cost €6.6bn.
Concept studies for the collider began in 1984, with a project application being made in 1994 and the first contract being awarded in 1999. The collider should start operating for physics this July and is due to operate until 2030.
“We're getting to projects that are starting to match the medieval cathedrals of Europe in terms of scope and scale, as far as individual members of the workforce are concerned,” said Philippe le Brun, accelerator technology department head at CERN.
Industry's role
Industry's role in this effort has been to provide both standard products and the supporting engineering and manufacturing skills and capacity to make the non-standard parts the accelerator employs.
“It's difficult to go from a prototype to mass manufacturing and that's where industry comes in,” said Thierry Lagrange, purchasing service group leader at CERN.
He gave the example of producing the 1,200 15m-long cryodipoles (superconducting dipole magnets) for the accelerator. CERN did the initial design and prototyping work for these vital components over five years, and then started preparing industry to make them by providing tooling. CERN bought the critical sub-assemblies, which were then delivered to the magnet assemblers to put together. CERN took an unusual approach to the assembly contracts, taking on the risk of the resulting parts not working.
“Our 'build to risk' approach meant having the magnets built to a specification. CERN would carry the risk [if the specification could not be met],” he said. This does not mean a free-for-all: the performance standards imposed on the industrial partners are very high.
CERN has been similarly innovative in other parts of its contracting. CERN rules insist that it buys components from the lowest bidder for a contract. So in order to get the performance and efficiency it needed for critical components, it had to define what it wanted on the basis of both capital cost and operating costs over 10 years.
Intellectual property
Because of its contracting regime, CERN freely admits that partners will not make excessive profits out of working with CERN. Instead industrial partners gain a lot of technical knowledge by serving a very high technology customer, as well as the marketing value and prestige of having CERN as a reference customer. This business model works well for some companies, but less well for others.
According to Dr Jean-Marie Le Goff, technology transfer group leader at CERN, there's usually a tension between research and industry over intellectual property (IP) issues. On the science side of the equation, the IP situation is complex with joint ownership and complex dissemination routes. On the industrial side, ownership of IP is clear and dissemination happens through manufacturing.
“So we needed an IP management strategy that balanced openness and commercial exploitation,” Le Goff said. The result is a simple strategy in which, if a company develops IP while serving CERN, CERN keeps a non-exclusive licence to use the IP for high-energy physics. “We want to avoid paying twice for things we have already had developed for us.”
The dissemination principle is that the first option to use a technology goes to member state companies. IP should be paid for at commercial prices, and military use is not allowed. The underlying charter of the technology transfer office is to promote dissemination, rather than to generate income.
Collaboration issues
Although much work has been shared between industry and CERN during the Large Hadron Collider project, the collaboration has not been entirely straightforward. There are scale issues. How does CERN keep an industrial partner interested over the 15 years it can take to go from defining a requirement to ordering the part? How does CERN get anyone to make tens or hundreds of very high technology parts that no one else may ever need, involving use of so-called “flexible workspace” production techniques rather than large-scale automation or small-volume manual work?
The answer has been to produce many of these parts through joint ventures rather than as turnkey projects (in which a third party controls the whole process and uses pre-built parts), which are blamed for a two-year delay on building the collider. Both sides then learn from each other. The approach also enables CERN to steer the production work to get the consistency and quality it needs. CERN has also had to cope with technical and managerial errors at its contractors, as well as nursing one through insolvency by providing a bridging loan.
So who wins in this sort of partnership between big science and industry? CERN has achieved the kind of qualitative and quantitative jumps in technology in high-field superconductors and superconducting magnets, as well as in the mass production of superfluid helium for coolant, it has needed to create the collider. It has been able to use partnerships to move lab prototypes and manufacturing techniques into industrial production. And it has done so within reasonable schedule and budget overruns.
What CERN hasn't been able to do is attract very large companies to work on these partnerships, even when the companies concerned are the experts in a required field. The benefits of working with a prestigious client are insufficient to justify the required diversion of skills and effort. Instead, partners tend to be the small to medium sized enterprises willing to put in extra effort while also developing their own knowledge and skills base.
EIRMA's members were keen to know how to identify unmet technical needs and opportunities at CERN, and what it could teach them about creating motivating career paths for scientists in their own companies.
CERN uses a number of mechanisms to define its needs, including regular exhibitions, a website, a network of industrial liaison officers, and its purchasing operation. In terms of motivating people to become involved, CERN has a huge advantage. It provides scientists with some of the world's most advanced experimental equipment to tackle some of the most difficult and fundamental questions in physics. From the evidence of this visit, there is no conflict between achieving high levels of personal motivation and excellent communication skills, and having a long-term career with one employer.