Design aspects related to the reliability of the control architecture of the LHC beam dump kicker systems

The LHC beam dump extraction kicker system consists per ring of 15 magnets and their pulse generators. Their task is to extract the beams on request, over the whole operational beam energy range and synchronously with the beam abort gap. This operation must be fail-safe to avoid damage to accelerator equipment by undesired beam losses. The control system of the LHC beam dump kickers will be based on a modular architecture composed of different subsystems, each with a specific function like slow control, beam energy tracking, beam abort gap synchronisation, fast pulse signal monitoring and post-mortem data acquisition. Depending on the required functionality, the subsystems will be based either on passive fault-tolerant redundant hardware solutions or on active fail-safe hardware and software solutions. In addition, for the most critical subsystems like the beam energy tracking and the beam abort gap synchronisation, two redundant solutions based on different technologies will be implemented in order to prevent common mode failures. This paper presents the current status of the LHC beam dump kicker systems control architecture design and reviews the different subsystems in their functional aspects and their reliability requirements.