FailSim: A Numerical Toolbox for the Study of Fast Failures and Their Impact on Machine Protection at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

The High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) foresees to reach a nominal, levelled luminosity of 5·10³⁴ cm⁻² s⁻¹ through a higher beam brightness and by using new equipment, such as larger aperture final focusing quadrupole magnets. The HL-LHC upgrade has critical impacts on the machine protection strategy, as the stored beam energy reaches 700 MJ for each of the two beams. Some failure modes of the novel active superconducting magnet protection system of the inner triplet magnets, namely the Coupling-Loss Induced Quench (CLIQ) systems, have been identified as critical. This paper reports on FailSim, a Python-language framework developed to study the machine protection impact of failure cases and their proposed mitigation. It provides seamless integration of the successive phases required by the simulation studies, i.e., verifying the optics, preparing and running a MAD-X instance for multiple particle tracking, processing and analysing the simulation results and summarising them with the relevant plots to provide a solid estimate of the beam losses, their location and time evolution. The paper also presents and discusses the result of its application on the spurious discharge of a CLIQ unit.