  A prototype of ion beam transport module has been developed at the Institut
Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien (IPHC) and used as a test bed to investigate
key issues related to the efficient transport of ion beams. This includes the
reduction of the beam losses, the increase of the acceptance, and the
definition of the instrumentation necessary to evaluate the performances. An
experiment was performed on a full-scale beam line and following a standard
beam analysis, steering, and focusing procedure. After a review of the
developments carried out for some demanding facilities and for the design of
the quadrupoles implemented in the transport module, the paper highlights the
challenge of measuring the preservation of transverse phase-space distributions
with large acceptance conditions, i.e. with the highest ratio of beam filling
to quadrupole aperture. Then, the tolerance to the errors and mitigation of the
risks are discussed, in particular by considering the electric stability of the
transport module, beam trips, behavior of the tail and the halo, and
misalignment errors.
