Commissioning Plan of the IFMIF-DONES Accelerator

IFMIF-DONES (International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility- DEMO-Oriented Neutron Early Source) - a powerful neutron irradiation facility for studies and certification of materials to be used in fusion reactors - is planned as part of the European roadmap to fusion electricity. Its main goal will be to characterize and to qualify materials under irradiation in a neutron field similar to the one faced in a fusion reactor. The intense neutron source is produced by impinging deuterons, from high-power linear deuteron accelerator, on a liquid lithium curtain. The facility has accomplished the preliminary design phase and is currently in its detailed design phase. At the present stage, it is important to have a clear understanding of how the commissioning of the facility will be performed, especially the commissioning of a 5 MW CW deuteron beam, together with the lithium curtain and the beam optimization for the neutron irradiation. In this contribution, the present plans for the hardware and beam commissioning of the accelerator will be given, focusing on the most critical aspects of the tiered approach and on the integration of the procedure with the lithium and tests systems

New developments on preparation of cooled and bunched radioactive ion beams at ISOL-Facilities: the ISCOOL project and the rotating wall cooling

Last years have become very productive for the research, construction and development of new facilities devoted to the production of beams with exotic radioisotopes (Radioactive Ion Beams, RIB). These beams are later used for experiments in fields like nuclear physics, atomic physics, astrophysics or medicine, among others. Within this kind of facilities, the ISOL facilities stand out. They are based on the on-line separation of radioactive isotopes produced in nuclear reactions between a target and a high-energy proton beam. The ISOL method was the pioneer for these facilities and it has kept up to now the leadership of RIB facilities. The main reason is ISOLDE, an ISOL facility located at CERN, the largest accelerator complex in the world, where this doctoral thesis has been carried out.The first innovation which is described is the design of an ion trap for the cooling and bunching of RIB's for ISOLDE, the so-called ISCOOL (ISOLDE COOLer). It is an Radio Frequency Quadrupole ion Cooler and Buncher (RFQCB), device based on the Paul traps. In these traps, the ions are confined in the three dimensions by electric fields. The ions are confined on the transverse plane with the pseudopotential well created by the Radio Frequency Quadrupole (RFQ) and focused on the longitudinal axis. At the same time, a gas (normally helium) fills the chamber with a pressure between 10-3 and 10-2 mbar. The collisions between the atoms or molecules of the gas and the ions. In addition, to drive the ions to the extraction of the RFQCB, an axial electric field is created by segmented electrodes. Different voltages are applied to these electrodes in order to choose the shape of the field. The shape can be chosen to create a potential well close to the extraction from the RFQCB in which the ions are accumulated and extracted as bunches, by the fast-switch of the voltages applied to the axial electrodes.The new ISCOOL will be installed as a permanent device of the ISOLDE beam lines

Beam-facing material selection for mitigation of residual doses in the HEBT of IFMIF-DONES

IFMIF-DONES will be an irradiation facility based on a 40 MeV deuteron accelerator. Unavoidable beam losses along the accelerator result in deuterium interactions with the beam facing materials of the vacuum beam pipe, some of them leading to material activation. The initial design of the beam pipe was based on stainless steel, but an evaluation of the residual doses from the pipe showed high values after operation of the accelerator. The accelerator beam line must be periodically maintained, and excessive cooling times for reaching acceptable dose levels may result in poorer availability of the facility. A deeper study of the High Energy Beam Transport line (HEBT) showed that a direct reaction between deuterons and iron in steel resulted in the production of Co-56, with a half-life of 77 days. This radioisotope is the main source of the radiation and makes it impractical to wait for a proper attenuation of the radiation field. A redesign of beam line elements has been performed to avoid the presence of stainless steel as a beam facing material and to replace it with aluminum where possible, resulting in faster decay of residual doses. This work contains a summary of the nuclear analysis performed for the computation of residual doses with stainless steel beam pipe, stressing the uncertainties of the calculations, based on the limited availability of nuclear data for the relevant nuclear reaction Fe56 (d,2n). The proposed replacement of element materials is also described, and an updated nuclear analysis shows the reduction of residual radiation, and its impact on possible maintenance operations

Performance Studies of a Single Vertical Beam Halo Collimation System at ATF2

International audienceIn order to reduce the background that could limit the precision of the diagnostics located in the ATF2 post-IP beamline, a single vertical beam halo collimation system was installed in March 2016. In this paper we present the measurements done in March and May 2016 in order to characterize the collimation system performance. Furthermore, the collimator wakefield impact has also been measured and compared with theoretical calculations and numerical simulations in order to determine the most efficient operation mode of the collimation system in terms of halo cleaning and negligible wakefield impact

Measurements of Momentum Halo Due to the Reduced RFQ Voltage During the LIPAc Beam Commissioning

International audienceThe Linear IFMIF Prototype Accelerator, LIPAc, is being commissioned aiming in particular at validating the RFQ up to 5MeV beam acceleration. Eventually, the nominal beam of 5 MeV-125 mA in 1 ms/1 Hz pulsed mode was achieved in 2019. The beam operation has been resumed since July 2023 after long maintenance including recovery from unexpected problems in the RFQ RF system. This new phase aims at the commissioning of the full configuration except SRF linac, which is replaced by a temporary beam transport line. Focusing on the RFQ behavior, it will be interesting to operate it at higher duty especially for longer pulses. Indeed, a beam simulation study suggested that the beam extracted from the RFQ includes considerable momentum halo when the RFQ voltage reduces by a few percent, with a slight decrease of mean energy. It can be a potential source of quench like the mismatched beam in the cryomodule. This could be studied measuring the energy from the Time-of-Flight among multiple BPMs while monitoring beam loss around the dipole, where momentum halo should be lost. During the upcoming commissioning, we propose to study them by scanning the RFQ voltage

Hardware availability calculations and results of the IFMIF accelerator facility

Hardware availability calculations have been done individually for each system of the deuteron accelerators of the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility (IFMIF). The principal goal of these analyses is to estimate the availability of the systems, compare it with the challenging IFMIF requirements and find new paths to improve availability performances.; Major unavailability contributors are highlighted and possible design changes are proposed in order to achieve the hardware availability requirements established for each system. In this paper, such possible improvements are implemented in fault tree models and the availability results are evaluated.; The parallel activity on the design and construction of the linear IFMIF prototype accelerator (LIPAc) provides detailed design information for the RAMI (reliability, availability, maintainability and inspectability) analyses and allows finding out the improvements that the final accelerator could have. Because of the R&D behavior of the LIPAc, RAMI improvements could be the major differences between the prototype and the IFMIF accelerator design.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

ATF2 Beam Halo Collimation System Background and Wakefield Measurements in the 2016 Runs

International audienceA single vertical beam halo collimation system has been installed in ATF2 in March 2016 to reduce the background in the IP and Post-IP region. In this paper, we present the results of an experimental program carried out during 2016 in order to demonstrate the efficiency of the vertical collimation system and measure the wakefields induced by such a system. Furthermore, a comparison of the measurements of the collimation system wakefield impact with CST PS numerical simulations and analytical calculations is also presented