Comparison of different antenna designs in the spallation neutron source negative hydrogen ion source

Abstract

Internal antenna negative hydrogen ion sources can fail when plasma heating causes ablation of the insulating coating due to small structural defects such as cracks. During this process, plasma ions impacting the surfaces of rf antennas causes heating of the coating, which can melt or ablate, thus exposing conducting surfaces to the plasma. Reducing antenna failures that reduce the operating capabilities of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) accelerator has been one of the top priorities of the SNS H-Source Program at ORNL.We have been utilizing numerical modeling of internal antenna negative hydrogen ion sources in order help optimize antenna designs in order to reduce antenna failures. We have implemented a number of fluid models with electromagnetics using the simulation tool USim and applied them to modeling the SNS internal antenna negative ion source. We report here on results comparing two different antenna designs. The baseline design, as is currently in use in the SNS source, and a wide-leg design, that has been tested, and may replace the baseline design if it can reduce antenna failures while still maintaining source performance. The wide-leg antenna is designed to move the antenna supports out of the high-density plasma regions, in order to decrease the possible negative effects of ion bombardment.We model the plasma evolution using a single-fluid MHD model with an imposed magnetic field due to the rf antenna current and the confining multi-cusp field for both the baseline and wide-leg antenna configurations. We find that the maximum plasma velocity near the antenna surfaces is reduced by nearly 50% in the wide-leg configuration, and that overall the bulk plasma velocity is reduced for this configuration. In addition, although we measure a small increase in the maximum plasma flux on the antenna surface for the wide-leg design, we see a broad-based reduction of plasma flux on the antenna in the regions where the antenna is mostly exposed to the plasma, corresponding to where failures are likely to occur.