• J.D. Gilpatrick, P. Chacon, M.E. Gruchalla, D. Martinez, J.F. Power, B.G. Smith, M.A. Taylor
  LANL, Los Alamos, New Mexico

The primary goal of this newly installed beam profile measurement is to provide the facility operators and physicists with a reliable horizontal and vertical projected beam distribution and location with respect to the proton beam target and beam aperture. During a 3000-hour annual run cycle, 5 microcoulombs of charge is delivered every 50 milliseconds through this harp to the downstream 1L target. The resulting radioactive annual dose near this harp is at least 600 MRads. Because of this harsh environment, the new harp design has been further optimized for robustness. For example, compared to an earlier design, this harp has half of the sensing wires and utilizes only a single bias plane. The sensing fibers consist of a 0.078-mm diameter SiC fiber. To hold these fibers to a rigid ceramic structure, a “collet” fiber-clamping device accomplishes the three goals of maintaining a mechanical fiber clamp, holding the sense fiber under a slight tensile force, and providing a sensing fiber electrical connection. This paper describes the harp analysis and design, and provides fabrication, assembly, and installation information, and shows how facility wiring was altered.

• M.E. Gruchalla, P. Chacon, J.D. Gilpatrick, D. Martinez, J.F. Power, B.G. Smith
  LANL, Los Alamos, New Mexico

The goal of the design LANSCE-R Wire-Scanner Analog Front-end Electronics is to develop a high-performance, dual-axis wire-scanner analog front-end system implemented in a single cRIO module. This new design accommodates macropulse widths as wide as 700 us at a maximum pulse rate of 120 Hz. A lossey integrator is utilized as the integration element to eliminate the requirement for providing gating signals to each wire scanner. The long macropulse and the high repetition rate present conflicting requirements for the design of the integrator. The long macropulse requires a long integration time constant to assure minimum integrator droop for accurate charge integration, and the high repetition rate requires a short time constant to assure adequate integrator reset between macropulses. Also, grounding is a serious concern due to the small signal levels. This paper reviews the basic Wire Scanner AFE system design implemented in the cRIO-module form factor to capture the charge information from the wire sensors and the grounding topology to assure minimum noise contamination of the wire signals.