A compact control system to achieve stable voltage and low jitter trigger for repetitive intense electron-beam accelerator based on resonant charging

Abstract

A compact control system based on Delphi and Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA) is developed for a repetitive intense electron-beam accelerator(IEBA), whose output power is 10GW and pulse duration is 160ns. The system uses both hardware and software solutions. It comprises a host computer, a communication module and a main control unit. A device independent applications programming interface, devised using Delphi, is installed on the host computer. Stability theory of voltage in repetitive mode is analyzed and a detailed overview of the hardware and software configuration is presented. High voltage experiment showed that the control system fulfilled the requests of remote operation and data-acquisition. The control system based on a time-sequence control method is used to keep constant of the voltage of the primary capacitor in every shot, which ensured the stable and reliable operation of the electron beam accelerator in the repetitive mode during the experiment. Compared with the former control system based on Labview and PIC micro-controller developed in our laboratory, the present one is more compact, and with higher precision in the time dimension. It is particularly useful for automatic control of IEBA in the high power microwave effects research experiments where pulse-to-pulse reproducibility is required.