LBNL Engineering Division

Technicians and engineers have achieved a major milestone, completing a 2-year project to wind the closed-loop coil for the MARS-D magnet. This magnet will help power the fourth-generation electron cyclotron resonance ion source (ECRIS) for the 88-Inch Cyclotron.

This project involved:
24 wire layers
6,000 meters of wire
27,648 bending corners

Find out how this incredibly challenging and technically difficult work was accomplished.
Read more: https://engineering.lbl.gov/2026/05/14/made-in-berkeley-lab-winding-a-novel-closed-loop-coil-magnet-structure/

Engineering Division Machinist Mike Gronley inspects the thickness of a prototype fiber-positioning robot, which he fabricated on a wire EDM machine in the Lab’s machine shop. The piece required very tight tolerances, as well as thin features. The thin sections had to be between 0.175 mm and 0.225 mm—that’s about the thickness of two sheets of paper stacked together, plus or minus a couple of pieces of dust!

“The machine shop is the place to bring these kinds of projects,” Gronley says. “For instance, my background of nearly 20 years making medical devices makes me comfortable taking on tricky little parts like this. Between all of the machinists here, we have over 100 years of experience in vastly different industries. This allows us to tackle just about any part, process, and/or material. I take a lot of pride in my work on these projects, where my attention to detail and understanding of the parts' performance requirements can mean the difference between success and failure of the target experiment.”

These prototype fiber-positioning robots are being made for Spec-S5, a next-generation instrument that will map the universe using spectroscopy, continuing the work of the current DESI Survey.

Photo: Nick Wenner, Berkeley Lab