External Audit of the LHC Beam Loss Monitoring System
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Europe/Zurich
865/1-B03 (CERN)
Description
Critical Systems Labs Inc.
#618 - 475 Howe Street, Vancouver, B.C. Canada V6C 2B3Auditors: Dr. Jeff Joyce, <mailto:jeff.joyce@cslabs.com>Dr. Laurent Fabre, <mailto:laurent.fabre@cslabs.com>Dr. Naghmeh Ghafari, <mailto:naghmeh.ghafari@cslabs.com>Dr. Wolfgang Strigel
Scope of the audit:
CERN internal reviews have been performed in the past and these reviews focused primarily on the analogue parts of the system design. Therefore the CSL review will focus more on the digital parts and particularly on the programmable parts of this system. The essential and foremost question that will drive the CSL technical review is:
“Are the digital and programmable parts of the BLM system going to perform as they are intended to in the context of the BLM system?”
This review will seek to:
- assess the adequacy of the overall BLM system design with a focus on the programmable parts
- identify possible weaknessesin the programmable parts of the mission-critical BLM
- suggest activities that could increase the level of confidence that the programmable parts of BLM system performs as intended
- suggest potential improvementsof the BLM
- provide a general comparison of the BLM with approaches in industrial systems.
- Potential sources of unsafety within the BLM, where the detection of an amount of particle losses that has the potential to quench the magnet is not relayed to the Beam Interlock System, resulting in a ‘missed generation of beam dump trigger’ and potentially machine damage.
- Potential sources of unavailability, where failure of the BLM leads to a request to the Beam Interlock System to dump the beam, resulting in a ‘false dump trigger’and some machine downtime.
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