Considerations on an Upgrade Possibility of the LHC Beam Dump Kicker System

The LHC Beam Dump System (LBDS) is designed to safely dispose the circulating beams over a wide range of energy from 450 GeV up to 7 TeV, where the maximum stored energy is 362 MJ per beam. One of the most critical components of the LBDS are the extraction kickers that must reliably switch on within the 3 us particle-free abort gap. To ensure this functionality, even in the event of a power-cut, the power generator capacitors remain charged and hence the Gate Turn-Off (GTO) switch stack has to hold the full voltage throughout beam operation. The increase of the LHC collision energy to 13 TeV has increased the voltage levels at the GTO stacks and during re-commissioning an increased rate of high-voltage (HV) related issues at the level of the GTO stack was observed. Different solutions have been analysed and an improved GTO stack will be implemented. This paper also outlines the benefit of adding more kicker magnets to improve the voltage hold off issues and to improve the tolerance to missing kickers during extraction.