• F.F. Bertinelli, N. Catalan-Lasheras, P. Fessia, C. Garion, S.J. Mathot, A. Perin, C.E. Scheuerlein, S. Sgobba, H.H.J. Ten Kate, J.Ph. G. L. Tock, A.P. Verweij, G.P. Willering
  CERN, Geneva

Fol­low­ing the anal­y­sis of the Septem­ber 2008 LHC in­ci­dent, the as­sem­bly pro­cess and the qual­i­ty as­sur­ance of the main 13 kA in­ter­con­nec­tion splices were im­proved, with new mea­sure­ment and di­ag­nos­tics meth­ods in­tro­duced. Dur­ing the 2008-2009 shut­down ~5% of these 10 000 splices were newly as­sem­bled with these im­prove­ments im­ple­ment­ed, but es­sen­tial­ly main­tain­ing the orig­i­nal de­sign. It is known today that a lim­it­ing fac­tor to­wards 7 TeV op­er­a­tion is the nor­mal con­duct­ing re­sis­tance of ~15% of the orig­i­nal main 13 kA in­ter­con­nec­tion splices, as­so­ci­at­ed to the elec­tri­cal con­ti­nu­ity of the cop­per sta­bilis­er. A "Splices Task Force" has been set up at CERN to eval­u­ate the need for, de­vel­op and test de­sign im­prove­ments and pre­pare the im­ple­men­ta­tion of a con­sol­i­da­tion cam­paign. Im­por­tant is­sues of splice de­sign, pro­cess choice, re­sources and time re­quire­ments are con­sid­ered.