Application of the New Generic Quench Detection System for LHC's 11 T Dipole Magnet

Abstract

The high luminosity upgrade of large hadron collider (LHC) introduces a large number of new superconducting elements of various technologies. In order to ensure protection of these elements, a modular, versatile quench detection system had been developed. Designed to be flexible enough to detect quenches in superconducting bus-bars as well as in magnets, one generic base system is applied to various detection tasks. The fully customized system is based on a field programmable gate array that is connected to 16 galvanically insulated front-end channels. Due to the presence of radiation in some of the dedicated installation areas, the system is designed to be radiation tolerant up to 1 Gy/y. The first application of this system is the 11 T dipole magnet in Nb3Sn technology, which is foreseen to be installed during LHC's long shutdown 2. To gain experience with magnets made with this superconductor, which had not been used in LHC so far, the development of the detection system follows the tests of the magnet prototypes. Especially, the mitigation of flux jumps to avoid false triggers is a challenge for the system. A description of the hardware and firmware is given. Measurements from the recent magnet prototype and mitigation techniques against electrical oscillations are presented.