Beam obstacles: a nuclear engineering problem in the design of high energy accelerators

The design of future accelerators, such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), requires the development of Beam Obstacles (targets, absorbers, collimators, etc.) capable of intercepting high-energy, high-intensity fluxes of particles. Advanced simulation techniques and high performance computing are needed to study the related large-scale, complex physical phenomena. Hydro-codes, equations of state (including phase changes), finite element and meshless methods coupled to Monte-Carlo techniques are indispensable tools in the design activity and represent in themselves a formidable challenge.