• J.D. Sedillo, J.D. Gilpatrick, F. Gonzales, J.F. Power
  LANL, Los Alamos, New Mexico

The LANSCE accelerator facility utilizes 110 wire scanner devices to monitor the accelerator's charged particle beam. The LANSCE facility's existing wire scanner control systems have remained relatively unchanged since the LANSCE accelerator became operational in the 1970's. The evolution of motion control technologies now permits the development of a wire scanner motion control system that improves in areas of energy efficiency, precision, speed, resolution, robustness, upgradeability, maintainability, and overall cost. The purpose of this project is to research the capabilities of today's motion control products and analyze the performance of these products when applied to a wire scanner beam profile measurement. This experiment's test bed consists of a PC running LabVIEW, a National Instruments motion controller, and a LEDA (Low Energy Demonstration Accelerator) actuator. From this experiment, feedback sensor performance and overall motion performance (with an emphasis on obtaining maximum scan speed) has been evaluated.