RF-thermal-structural-RF coupled analysis on a travelling wave disk-loaded accelerating structure

Abstract

The travelling wave (TW) disk-loaded accelerating structure is one of the key components in normal conducting (NC) linear accelerators, and has been studied for many years. In the design process, usually after the dimensions of each cell and the two couplers are finalized, the structure is fabricated and tuned, and then the whole structure RF characteristics are measured by using a vector network analyzer. Before fabrication, the whole structure characteristics (including RF, thermal and structural ones) are less simulated due to the limited capability of currently available computers. In this paper, we described a method for performing RF-thermal-structural-RF coupled analysis on a TW disk-loaded structure using only one PC. In order to validate our method, we first analyzed and compared our RF simulation results on the 3 m long BEPC II structure with the corresponding experimental results, which shows very good consistency. Finally, the RF-thermal-structure-RF coupled analysis results on the 1.35 m long NSC KIPT linac accelerating structure are presented.