Team Tesla:
How We Keep the World’s Most Powerful Magnets in Shape

By Kristen Eliza Coyne

The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory is home to some of the strongest magnets on the planet. The DC Field Facility at our Tallahassee, Florida, headquarters, which houses just a portion of our magnets, boasts several world-record holders alone: the highest field resistive magnet (at 35 tesla); the resistive magnet with the highest homogeneity (our 25-tesla Keck magnet); and the awesome 35-ton, 45-tesla hybrid magnet, which produces the highest sustained magnetic field of any magnet, anywhere.

It’s like a team of world-class athletes — Team Tesla, we’ll call them, tesla being the unit of measure of magnetic field strength. (The Earth’s magnetic field is one twenty thousandth of a tesla.) They have an awful lot of power, but to stay in that kind of shape, they need to eat and drink — a lot.

And boy, do these athletes get fed; vast amounts of electricity and water are needed to keep them competitive. Think of the electricity we feed these magnets as an endless supply of PowerBars, and the water like a constant flow of Gatorade.

In the Control Room of the lab's DC Field Facility.

Behind any good team are outstanding trainers, and Team Tesla is no exception. These trainers staff the Mag Lab’s Control Room: Picture a smaller version of NASA’s mission control. There, 17 hours a day, highly specialized technicians surrounded by dozens of computer screens keep tabs on every inch of wire, every elbow of plumbing, every temperature reading and field measurement. Overseen by Magnet Operations Head Bryon Dalton, it is truly the brain of the lab, where all the data comes in and most of the day-to-day operational decisions are made.

Read on to learn how the lab has developed unique power and water systems to service these hungry all-stars.

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