High Energy Beam Impacts on Beam Intercepting Devices: Advanced Numerical Methods and Experimental Set-up

Beam Intercepting Devices are potentially exposed to severe accidental events triggered by direct impacts of energetic particle beams. State-of-the-art numerical methods are required to simulate the behaviour of affected components. A review of the different dynamic response regimes is presented, along with an indication of the most suited tools to treat each of them. The consequences on LHC tungsten collimators of a number of beam abort scenarios were extensively studied, resorting to a novel category of numerical explicit methods, named Hydrocodes. Full shower simulations were performed providing the energy deposition distribution. Structural dynamics and shock wave propagation analyses were carried out with varying beam parameters, identifying important thresholds for collimator operation, ranging from the onset of permanent damage up to catastrophic failure. Since the main limitation of these tools lies in the limited information available on constitutive material models under extreme conditions, a dedicated experimental programme has been proposed, relying on the HiRadMat test facility at CERN. Experimental aspects such as sample-holder design and test set-up are described in this paper.