Commissioning of the Control System for the LHC Beam Dump Kicker System

The beam dumping system of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) provides a loss-free fast extraction of the circulating beams. It consists per ring of 15 extraction kickers, followed by 15 septum magnets, 10 dilution kickers and an external absorber. A dump request can occur at any moment during the operation of the collider, from injection energy up to collision energy. All kickers must fire synchronously with the beam abort gap to properly extract the whole beam in one single turn into the extraction channel. Incorrect operation of the extraction kickers can lead to beam losses and severe damage to the machine. The control system of the LHC beam dump kickers is based on a modular architecture composed of 4 different sub-systems, each with a specific function, in order to detect internal failures, to ensure a correct extraction trajectory over the whole LHC operational range, to synchronise and distribute dumps requests, and to analyse the transient signals recorded during the beam dumping process. The control architecture is presented and the different steps performed for its validation, from the individual sub-systems tests to the final commissioning with beam, are described.