Abstract
Recent advances in superconducting rf (SRF) technology allow for increasingly more reliable and higher power hadron linacs. They hold enormous potential for economic, scientific, medical, environmental, and national security fields. Moving this technology from one of a kind laboratory demonstration devices to industrial scale applications imposes strict requirements on the linac performance in terms of its stability, reliability, and availability. The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) is currently the highest average power superconducting proton linac in the world that has been routinely operated since 2006. We present statistical data on the SNS SRF linac reliability obtained from its practical operational experience during 2020. We analyze the frequency and duration of SRF cavity trips and identify their causes. These data will show that SRF cavity trips are the most common source of single-point failure within the linac. In an industrial environment, where redundancy is a necessity to prevent interruption of facility operation, the linac beam can be quickly restored by redistributing the failed cavity function to downstream energy reserve SRF cavities. We present a practical demonstration of this approach. We intentionally turn off one of the cavities and recover the beam by readjusting the phases of downstream cavities to maintain the same linac beam energy output. We discuss limitations of this approach at SNS and how they can be overcome.
Highlights
High-power proton linac technology has been rapidly developing in recent years as several high-power linacs have been operating and are being built and many more are being designed and proposed around the world [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
The front end and warm linac accelerate to 186 MeV. It consists of an ion source, a 402.5 MHz radio-frequency quadrupole (RFQ), a medium-energy beam transport section (MEBT), a 402.5 MHz drift-tube linac (DTL), and an 805 MHz coupled cavity linac (CCL)
In fiscal year 2020 (FY20), the weekly Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) availability was consistently above 90% with a year average of 95%. This is a remarkable result given that the linac energy margin corresponds to a single superconducting rf (SRF) cavity
Summary
High-power proton linac technology has been rapidly developing in recent years as several high-power linacs have been operating and are being built and many more are being designed and proposed around the world [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. These linacs are currently used primarily as research devices.
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