ACHIEVING A HIGHLY CONFIGURABLE PERSONNEL PROTECTION SYSTEM FOR EXPERIMENTAL AREAS

The personnel protection system of the secondary beam experimental areas at CERN manages the beam and access interlocking mechanism. Its aim is to guarantee the safety of the experimental area users against the hazards of beam radiation and laser light. The highly configurable, interconnected, and modular nature of those areas requires a very versatile system. In order to follow closely the operational changes and new experimental setups and to still keep the required level of safety, the system was designed with a set of matrices, which can be quickly reconfigured. Through a common paradigm, based on industrial hardware components, this challenging implementation has been made for both the PS and SPS experimental halls, according to the IEC 61508 standard. The current system is based on a set of hypotheses formed during 25 years of operation. Conscious of the constant increase in complexity and the broadening risk spectrum of the present and future experiments, we propose a framework intended as a practical guide to structure the design of the experimental layouts based on risk evaluation, safety function prescriptions and field equipment capabilities.