Reliability Issues on the LHC Beam Dumping System

The Beam Dumping System of the Large Hadron Collider, presently under construction at CERN, must function with utmost reliability to protect the personnel, minimize the risk of severe damage to the machine and avoid undue impact to the environment. The dumping action must be synchronized with the particle free gap and the field of the extraction and dilution elements must be well adjusted to the beam energy. The measures taken to arrive at a reliable and safe system will be described, like the adoption of fault tolerant design principles and other safety related features as comprehensive monitoring, diagnostics and protection facilities. These issues will be discussed in the general framework of the IEC standard recommendations for safety critical systems. Some examples related to the most critical functions will be included.