Nuclear Engineering and Technology (Sep 2024)
The study and design of a deuteron drift tube linear accelerator for middle energy neutron source
Abstract
The paper concerns a room-temperature cross-bar H-mode (CH) drift tube linac (DTL) with KONUS (Kombinierte Null Grad Struktur) [1,2] beam dynamics. To make the acceleration in DTL cell more efficient, we studied the correlation between transit time factor (TTF) and structural coefficients, first. Furthermore, we developed a new code with Python to demonstrate the longitudinal dynamics more clearly. The code computationally generates clusters, bunch centers, and emittance growth in a single figure. Thus, the stabilization region and cluster evolution at various negative phases can be studied. Based on the above studies, we designed a 162.5 MHz CH-DTL to accelerate 10 mA D+ from 2.11 MeV to 3.25 MeV in continuous-wave (CW) mode. The proposed CH-DTL is a part of the Middle Energy Neutron Source (MENS). The dynamics and RF design were iterated to make the gap voltage error lower than 1 %. The initial beam is assumed to come from a Radio Frequency Quadrupole accelerator (RFQ). The geometries of the CH-DTL are optimized by using CST. Multiparticle tracking from LEBT to RFQ is performed with TraceWin and the transmission efficiency in the CH-DTL is 100 %.