Quench Protection and Powering in a String of Superconducting Magnets for the Large Hadron Collider

Practical experience has been attained on the LHC Test String (String~1), composed of one 3~m long superconducting twin-aperture prototype quadrupole and three 10~m long superconducting twin-aperture prototype dipoles. The protection diodes are housed in the cold mass of the short straight section. The quench protection system acts on the half-cell level. During the operation of the LHC Test String, magnet quenches have been provoked manually by firing the quench heaters or occured manually by exceeding the critical temperature or critical current density of the superconductor. Most of the data could be measured while some parameters (magnet current, diode current, average temperature, etc.) cannot be directly measured. A simulation progam has been developed to calculate the missing data. The validation of the model has been performed by comparing measured and simulated data. The modelling of the quench behaviour of the final version of the LHC magnets show that hot-spot temperatures and voltages to ground can be kept within safe limits as long as the variations in heater delay values of RRR are not too large.