Machine Protection and Interlock System for Large Research Instruments

Major research instruments such as accelerators and fusion reactors operate with large amount of power and energy stored in beams and superconducting magnets. Highly reliable Machine Protection systems are required to operate such instruments without damaging equipment in case of failure. The increased interest in protection is related to the increasing beam power of high-power proton accelerators such as ISIS, SNS, ESS and the PSI cyclotron, to the large energy stored in the beam (in particular for hadron colliders such as LHC) and to the stored energy in magnet systems such as for ITER and LHC. Machine Protection includes process and equipment monitoring, a system to safely stop operation (e.g. dumping the beam or extracting the energy stored in the magnets) and an interlock system for highly reliable communication between protection systems. Depending on the application, the reaction of the protection function to failures must be very fast (for beam protection systems down to some us). In this paper an overview of the challenges for protection is given, and examples of interlock systems and their use during operation are presented.