Conceptual design and scaled experimental validation of an actively damped carbon tie rods support system for the stabilization of future particle collider superstructures

This paper presents a simple solution to increase the stability of the large superstructures supporting the final electromagnets of future linear particle collider. It consists of active carbon fiber tie rods, fixed at one end on the structure and at the other end to the detector through active tendons. In the first part of the paper, the solution has been tested on a finite element model of one half of the CLIC_ILD final focus structure. With a reasonable design, it is shown numerically that the compliance can be decreased by at least a factor 4, i.e., that the structure is 4 times more robust to technical noise at low frequency. Two additional features of the active rods are that they can also actively damp the structural resonances and realign the superstructures. The second part of the paper presents a successful experimental validation of the concept, applied to a scaled test bench, especially designed to contain the same modal characteristics as the full scale superstructure.