Cold mass integration of the ATLAS barrel toroid magnets at CERN

The ATLAS Barrel Toroid, part of the ATLAS Detector built at CERN, is comprised of 8 coils symmetrically placed around the LHC beam axis. The coil dimensions are 25 m length, 5 m width and 0.4 m thickness. Each coil cold mass consists of 2 double pancakes of aluminum stabilized NbTi conductor held in an aluminum alloy casing. Because the magnet is conduction cooled a good bonding between the superconducting winding and the coil casing is a basic requirement. Due to the high load level induced by the Lorentz forces on the double pancakes, a pre-stressing technique has been developed for the assembling of the double pancake windings in the coil casing. This prestressing technique uses inflatable bladders made of extruded aluminum tubes filled with glass microballs and epoxy resin then cured under pressure. The paper describes the design of the system as well as the problems occurred during the assembling of the 8 superconducting ATLAS coils and the ATLAS B0 prototype coil, and the behavior of the Barrel Toroid coils with respect to this prestress during the cold tests.