Dynamic compensation of an rf cavity failure in a superconducting linac

Abstract

An accelerator driven system (ADS) for transmutation of nuclear waste typically requires a 600 MeV–1 GeV accelerator delivering a proton flux of a few mA for demonstrators, and of a few tens of mA for large industrial systems. Such a machine belongs to the category of the high-power proton accelerators, with an additional requirement for exceptional “reliability”: because of the induced thermal stress to the subcritical core, the number of unwanted “beam trips” should not exceed a few per year, a specification that is several orders of magnitude above usual performance. In order to meet this extremely high reliability, the accelerator needs to implement, to the maximum possible extent, a fault-tolerance strategy that would allow beam operation in the presence of most of the envisaged faults that could occur in its beam line components, and in particular rf systems’ failures. This document describes the results of the simulations performed for the analysis of the fault-tolerance capability of the XT-ADS superconducting linac in the case of an rf cavity failure. A new simulation tool, mixing transient rf behavior of the accelerating cavities with full 6D description of the beam dynamics, has been developed for this purpose. Fast fault-recovery scenarios are proposed, and required research and development is identified.