Phase 2 of the QUACO PCP project started on 4 July 2017, with contracts awarded to the three winning companies of the tendering, Antec/Tecnalia Consortium, Elytt Energy and Sigmaphi. In this phase, the contractors have continued their work with detailed engineering design based on the conceptual designs proposed in Phase 1. The experts of the Buyers Group evaluated the quality and engineering feasibility of the designs, and the contractors continued with mock-up development to verify the validity of their solutions.

All three companies have developed very different kind of solutions that contain many innovative aspects. One of these is Elytt’s engineering efforts in designing industrial manufacture toolings with modularity features to realise conventional collared quadrupole coils type. Sigmaphi in turn proposes an innovative concept for the collaring of MQYY magnets relying on an azimuthal prestress of the coil provided by the thermal shrinkage of aluminium collars. They make efforts in designing innovative industrial manufacture tooling with modularity features to realize their solution. The Antec/Tecnalia Consortium is working on a challenging innovation using the Bladder & Keys method to apply pre-stress on the coils, a technique that has never been applied in double-aperture superconducting accelerator magnets before.

The three companies shall finalize their mock-ups by the end of July 2018, after which the Buyers Group will evaluate their performance and invite the successful contractors to submit a tender for the third and final phase. In the final phase, which is scheduled to start in the beginning of November 2018, the two selected contractors shall build a full-scale prototype of the magnet.