EQUIPMENT FAILURE AND BEAM LOSSES IN THE LHC

The LHC has been designed to operate at an energy of 7 TeV with a luminosity of . This requires two beams with 2808 bunches, each bunch with pro-tons. The energy stored in each beam is about 350 MJ, sufficient to heat and melt 500 kg of copper. At 7 TeV, a loss fraction of about could quench a superconduct-ing magnet. Protection systems to prevent uncontrolled beam loss include the beam dump system, the collimation system, the beam loss monitors and the interlock system. For optimizing the parameters of the machine protection systems, the effect of various failure scenarios on the cir-culating beams is discussed. The most likely failures are magnet quenches and power converter faults. Taking into account the time constants for the decay of the magnetic field, the impact on the orbit and the beam loss at the colli-mators is derived.