AV S

B E E F I N G U P

B I G S C I E N C E

T H E C O M P A N Y

AVS was founded in Eibar, Spain, in 2006 as

a “transversal” company, able to solve dif ferent

problems for big-science facilities and aerospace

rather than specialising in one type of product

or service. Today it has some 100 employees,

a turnover of €15m, and develops and supplies

in a number of areas, including large vacuum

chambers and in-vacuum precision mechanics.

T H E W O R K

The f irst contract AVS won from the ESRF was

the construction of a high-precision detector tube

for the ID02 small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS)

beamline in 2012. This “camera” consists of

a 33-metre-long, two-metre-diameter vacuum

tube, in which a detector can move about with

sub-millimetre precision, on a wagon with a mass

of over four tonnes.

AVS’s most recent contract for the ESRF, however,

was the delivery between 2016 and 2018 of

half of the 129 steel girders for the synchrotron’s

Extremely Brilliant Source (EBS) upgrade. These

girders support the cutting-edge magnets and

instrumentation for the new X-ray source, which

means that AVS had to make them very stable

and with a very tight tolerance. Each girder is over

f ive metres long and 12 tonnes in mass, yet with

a f latness within 40 microns.

T H E I M P A C T

“AVS had limited interactions with synchrotrons

before it started the SAXS tube project. The design

was a collaborative ef fort that took a year and

marked a turning point for us at the ESRF proving

that we could build systems that nobody had

ever considered before The girders project was

even more ambitious and again we acquired new

conf idence and expertise in particular maintaining

quality in serial production over a long timeframe

Our subsequent growth in activity for synchrotrons

has been exponential and if we had the opportunity

to quote for the same project again we would

quote for all the girders not just half With other

synchrotrons planning to upgrade their sources

I expect that we may have that opportunity soon

Pedro Noguera Crespo project manager AVS

“Since our ESRF work,

our growth in activity

for synchrotrons has

been exponential.”

Pedro Noguera Crespo,

project manager, AVS

Industry supplies the ESRF with advanced technologyI M P A C T O N I N D U S T R Y

KEY FACTS

For the ESRFs EBS upgrade more than

100 companies supplied parts and services

each worth more than 50k The ESRFs

purchases totalled over 100m

The suppliers were mostly in the electrical

mechanicalmachining and vacuum sectors

based throughout Europe and beyond

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