Efficient Coupling of Hydrodynamic and Energy-Deposition Codes for Hydrodynamic-Tunnelling Studies on High-Energy Particle Accelerators

The machine-protection evaluation of high-energy accelerators comprises the study of beyond-design failures, including the direct beam impact onto machine elements. In case of a direct impact, the nominal beam of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) would penetrate more than 30 meters into a solid copper target. The penetration depth due to the time structure of the particle beam is, thus, significantly longer than predicted from purely static energy-deposition simulations with 7 TeV protons. This effect, known as hydrodynamic tunnelling, is caused by the beam-induced density depletion of the material at the target axis, which allows subsequent bunches to penetrate deeper into the target. Its proper simulation requires, therefore, to sequentially couple an energy-deposition code and a hydrodynamic code for the different target densities. This paper describes a method to efficiently couple the simulations codes Autodyn and FLUKA based on automatic density assignment and input file generation, and presents the results achieved for a sample case.