High Intensity Beam Test of Low Z Materials for the Upgrade of SPS-to-LHC Transfer Line Collimators and LHC Injection Absorbers

In the framework of the LHC Injector Upgrade (LIU) and High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) project, the collimators in the SPS-to LHC transfer lines will undergo important modifications. The changes to these collimators will allow them to cope with beam brightness and intensity levels much increased with respect to their original design parameters: nominal and ultimate LHC. The necessity for replacement of the current materials will need to be confirmed by a test in the High Radiation to Materials (HRM) facility at CERN. This test will involve low Z materials (such as Graphite and 3-D Carbon/Carbon composite), and will recreate the worst case scenario those materials could see when directly impacted by High luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) or Batch Compression Merging and Splitting (BCMS) beams. Thermo-structural simulations used for the material studies and research, the experiment preparation phase, the experiment itself, pre irradiation analysis (including ultrasound and metrology tests on the target materials), the results and their correlation with numerical simulations will be presented.