The biggest science projects transcend national barriers. It takes high levels of collaboration between engineers and scientists from different countries to pursue the loftiest scientific aims. If you want spacecraft to explore the Universe, giant particle accelerators to solve the biggest mysteries in Physics, the resources to cure incurable diseases - it takes a group effort.
Engineers and engineering companies from around the world make these big international experiments possible. Without them scientists would be stuck with unproven theories. Would we have ever found the Higgs-Boson if it weren’t for the efforts of thousands of engineers? The answer is, of course, no.
Big science is also big business. Europe’s main research funding mechanism, Framework Program Seven (FP7), ends this year to be succeeded by Horizon 2020. The research is worth €77.6bn over the next six years.
The European amount pales in comparison to the US, which is the largest spender on science research in the world. The US spent $64bn (€46bn) on non-defence research in 2013 alone. This is mainly allocated through Federal Departments such as the Department of Energy, Commerce, Agriculture and Homeland Security. But, when a country wants to prove they’ve joined the big leagues economically, there’s no better way of showing off than throwing money at big science experiments. The BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China are contributing more to global scientific research than ever before, thanks to their rapid growth rates and high levels of debt in the US and Europe.
With their massive budgets, grand aims and engineering achievements, there are certain experiments that have become the poster boys of big international science projects. This list features those top global experiments, from the perspective of the scale of their engineering achievements.
These are experiments that showcase the abilities of the 21st century engineers who design and build them as much as the scientists that use them. They have been collated and judged using decidedly unscientific methods but there are some criteria: the experiment has to be international, have scientific aims, be operational or planned in the near future; and involve the development and installation of new equipment and plant.
What’s obvious straight away is that the big money and most collaboration is spent in four main areas - space exploration, particle physics, astronomy and energy.
If you think we’ve missed any, or disagree with any of our choices - please do make amends in the comments section below!
1. The International Space Station
Right now, 400km above your head, travelling at 28,000 km/h 10 researchers are floating around in the
International Space Station (ISS) conducting experimenets. With the participation of 16 nations and a cost of $100 billion, the ISS can be called the ultimate international engineering project.
It’s a project that is easy to overlook. But it is a true engineering marvel, when you consider that it was built by astronauts in parts, flown up into space by shuttles and rockets. It is the largest artificial object in orbit and has about the same living space as a conventional five bedroom house. If that doesn’t impress you, not much will.
The first parts of the ISS launched in 1998. The station was completed in 2011 after over 100 rocket and space shuttle trips and 160 space walks. Made up of one long central spindle, off of which sprout symmetrical solar arrays and the modules which make up the living accommodation, research areas and station systems, the ISS proves that off-Earth, in-orbit construction is possible. The science conducted on the station has been going on for a couple of years, and is mainly focussed on the effects of microgravity on the human body.
Perhaps the biggest achievement of the engineers on the ISS project has been overcoming the political, cultural and IT and communications to collaborate with many international partners. The project has highlighted differences in approaches to engineering throughout the world, particularly between Russia and the US. It also started in the 1980s, so there have been some tough issues around obsolescence, logistics and technology to resolve. The in-orbit assembly of the station also created major operational configuration challenges. The station is a real feat of systems engineering - with modules requiring the ability to operate as stand-alone space stations, requiring many different baselines for structure, hardware, software, operational systems and interfaces.
Originally designed to complete its mission in 2016, an engineering analysis and risk study is being conducted by NASA at the moment to assess the space station’s continued operation into the 2020s.
2. Curiosity
The safe transportation, landing and operation of a remotely operated, semi-autonomous robot to determine Mars “habitability” is a particular achievement for Nasa’s engineers. But it’s a little-publicised fact that the $2.5 billion rover also contains equipment from Canada, Germany, Spain, Finland and Russia.
Curiosity landed on Mars in August 2012 for its two year mission to study the geology and climate of the planet and look for signs of an environment that could or did support life, such as water.
Germany contributed a device that detects water, Spain and Finland developed a device for Curiosity that acts as a weather station, tracking the surface conditions of the red planet. The Canadian Space Agency sent a device that analyses the composition of soil and rock samples.
Curiosity is, first and foremost, an American engineering achievement. But it also offers a glimpse of the kind of model for international cooperation in space exploration that will more frequently be needed for the big ticket missions.
For a more detailed look at the Curiosity rover, and other robotic explorers being developed around the world, click here.
3. The Square Kilometer Array
The
Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be the largest radio telescope ever built and will receive radio waves from objects further away than ever before. It’s scientific aim is to “answer fundamental questions about the origins and nature of the Universe”.
It will consist of thousands of antennas spread over two large areas in Australia and South Africa. The signals from these antennas will be sent to a central computer called the correlator using optical fibre. The correlator will combine the signals so the data can be analysed by astronomers. When the signals are combined the network of antennae will create a collecting area equivalent to a dish with an area of one square kilometre, hence the name. The SKA will be so sensitive that it will be able to detect an airport radar on a planet 50 light years away.
The SKA is an ambitious and complex engineering project, far beyond the scale of current and planned radio and optical telescopes. The Array will produce massive amounts of data, an estimated three exabytes. The super computing requirements to correlate and then process this data are massive. Furthermore, the requirement to guarantee the fidelity of the radio images that are built up from the extremely sensitive measurements recorded presents a massive challenge for the engineers designing and developing the Array. The scale of the SKA is unprecedented, so there may be any number systemic errors present from building such a large instrument. The telescope can only be built once, so it is vitally important to design it in a way that minimises such errors.
The scale of the project also presents many challenges on a more pragmatic level. The power consumption of some of the electronics will be astronomical. Running a supercomputer is extremely expensive, and SKA’s will have to be running all the time. Power also has to be distributed and paid for for the arrays out in the field, and the areas covered are very large. Engineers at academic institutions around the world are working on these, and many other engineering problems.
The baseline design of the SKA has been devised and will be developed over the next four years, to be ready for construction to start in 2017. Phase one of the SKA, roughly 10% of the total telescope, is then planned to be operational by 2022, with construction of the rest planned to commence soon after. The cost of the project is difficult to determine due to the early stages of the project, but initial cost estimates for the first phase are around €1.5 billion.
4. The European Extremely Large Telescope
If receiving radio signals from the unseen corners of the universe upsets your traditional idea of astronomy, the
European Extremely Large Telescope (EELT) will reassure you. The EELT will be a proper optical telescope, with a 39.3m diameter main mirror, almost four times the size of the world’s current largest telescope. It will collect 15 times more light than any existing telescope and will produce images 16 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.
At a cost of €1.06 billion, construction of the telescope was due to begin in Chile last year and be completed in 2023. However, the project is currently on hold until the Brazilian Government approves funding for its participation in the project.
Although not fundamentally different in design from the largest optical telescopes in Hawaii and the Canary Isles, the EELT poses challenges associated with its much larger scale. The main telescope will weigh about 2,800 tons and be enclosed by an 80m wide revolving enclosure.
The telescope’s main mirror will be made up of 798 hexagonal segments, each 1.45m across and only 50mm thick. Adaptive optics, a technology which cancels the distortions caused in images by the atmosphere, will also be used more in the EELT. The main component in the EELT’s adaptive electronics will be a large flexible mirror, which will be supported by more than 6,000 actuators and can distort its shape a thousand times per second.
5. Large Hadron Collider at CERN
The world’s foremost particle physics research laboratory, CERN is famous for its high energy physics experiments, such as the recent Higgs-Boson experiments, but is also the place where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
The main complex, which is located under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, consists of a series of particle accelerators, the largest of which is the now-famous
Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The laboratory has around 2,400 full time staff and although the total number can increase to up to 10,000 when a big experiment is on, as a guide there are normally ten times more engineers and technicians than research physicists at the facility.
Engineers designed, dug the tunnels and built the infrastructure for the particle accelerators. Engineers designed and built the complex machines that make up the accelerators - thousands of huge, highly accurate electromagnets that focus particle beams and send them around the circular tunnels to accelerate them. The world’s largest cryogenic system cools the electromagnets to almost zero in order that the wires supplying their electricity can work in a superconducting state. Highly sensitive detectors and sensors are used to observe and record results. Everything is joined together with miles of wiring and piping and electrical components.
The LHC has not yet reached its full power capacity for smashing particles together. Engineers and technicians have been repairing and upgrading the accelerator since January 2013, in preparation for the next series of experiments planned for November 2014, when it will run at 14TeV (teraelectronvolts). It cost £2.6 billion to build, which was funded by its 20 member nations, who also pay an annual subscription to keep the experiment running.
6. Institut Laue-Langevin
Staying in France and with particle physics, the
Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) isn’t as well-known outside of the scientific community as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. But it is just as ambitious and is truly a “vintage” institute, having opened in 1972 and contributed immeasurably to its field of study. The €2 billion facility in Grenoble offers the world’s brightest neutron beams to look inside objects and materials without damaging them.
ILL essentially provides scientists with neutrons and a range of instruments to conduct tests and experiments with. According to Dr Giuliana Manzin from the ILL, there are around 490 staff. About 80 are engineers and 190 are technicians. As well as developing and maintaining the neutron beam source, engineers design and implement the solutions required by the scientists and by the neutron user community. This involves the conception and installation of beam transport devices, neutron optics elements, sample environment material, neutron detectors and electronics, data acquisition and analysis systems.
The ILL instruments are big machines which can weigh up to several tons, which are used to study the properties of materials at the molecular and atomic scale. This means that the technical work carried out at the ILL involves knowledge in a wide variety of fields, from mechanics to optics, cryogenics, programming, electronics, vacuum, all needing to work harmoniously together.
Engineers also provide the project management skills needed to insure the design and construction of whole complex and innovative instruments and there is also a strong R&D programme.
The fundamental science conducted at ILL in fields such as condensed matter physics, chemistry, biology, nuclear physics and materials science leads to work on engine designs, fuels, plastics, electronics used every day. More than 800 experiments are performed annually at ILL and the facility is currently being upgraded and maintained with new instruments and components.
7. International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor
Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy research - a potential source of clean, abundant, cheap energy. Unfortunately, to obtain it necessitates recreating the conditions at the centre of the Sun on Earth. It’s a challenge that’s keeping engineers very busy indeed.
There are two approaches to achieving fusion energy research, both of which aim to produce machines able to combine hydrogen atoms together and harness the energy that is released as a result. A tokamak is the oldest of the two approaches and aims to superheat a gas, usually of deuterium and tritium, into a self-sustaining plasma, then contain it using a series of carefully aligned and very powerful electromagnets. Energy from the fusion of the hydrogen molecules in the plasma in the form of neutrons is harnessed by associated plant.
The
International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) is the latest evolution of the tokamak approach and is intended to be the next step towards developing a commercial-scale fusion reactor. Currently under construction in Cadarache at the South of France, Iter’s estimated costs are €15 billion. The involves seven partners: European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States. The prototype reactor is planned to achieve first fusion by 2027.
The challenges faced by Iter’s engineers are multitudinous and involve developing materials and components able to perform reliably and accurately in the most extreme conditions created on Earth. Many of these challenges are being worked on now by engineers at the Joint European Torus (JET) prototype reactor in Culham, Oxfordshire, in the UK. The JET reactor is currently the world’s largest and most advanced tokamak, and has had its lifetime extended in order to prepare for Iter.
There is lots of information on the engineering work going on for Iter on its official website. Particularly interesting is this description of how engineers intend to assemble the reactor itself. (http://www.iter.org/construction/assembly)
8. National Ignition Facility
The other approach to fusion energy is called inertial confinement fusion. This involves heating and compressing hydrogen atoms with lasers until they fuse together and ignite.
The
National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore, California, is the world’s foremost experiment in the area and houses the world’s most powerful laser. It’s so advanced it was used for filming the latest Star Trek film. Researchers at NIF reported this month that they had passed a key milestone towards their stated aim of achieving ignition with a high energy gain. For the first time during a fusion experiment they had caused the amount of energy released from the fusion reaction to exceed the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel.
The NIF works by firing 192 ultra-powerful laser beams on a tiny deuterium-tritium filled capsule. The recent milestone experiment had a total energy input of 1.8 MJ, about the same kinetic energy as a 2 tonne vehicle travelling at 100 mph.
The NIF cost $5 billion to design and build and $300 million a year to operate and is funded by the US. The facility contains 7,500 large optics, 26,000 small optics and 60,000 control points which are contain in 6,000 modular devices called line replaceable units. The laser pulses travel for one kilometre to the target in 4.5 microseconds hitting the target with an accuracy of 50 microns. Achieving this level of accuracy meant that the NIF building, structures, mirrors and machines were designed and built to be extremely stable and vibration-free. The foundations of the building are thick concrete, steel platforms are lightweight and there are vibration isolation mechanisms at all possible sources of vibration, such as pumps, motors and transformers. TIming is handled by a system that uses a GPS system.