Author: Gouin, B.
Paper Title Page
THPO023 Ageing of Airix Accelerating Units 3391
 
  • A. Georges, H. Dzitko, B. Gouin, M. Mouillet
    CEA, Pontfaverger-Moronvilliers, France
 
  Airix is a lin­ear ac­cel­er­a­tor pro­duc­ing a 60ns, 2kA, 19MeV elec­tron beam. It has been op­er­at­ed in a sin­gle shot mode by the “Com­mis­sari­at à l’En­ergie Atom­ique et aux En­er­gies Al­ter­na­tives” (CEA) for flash X-ray ra­dio­g­ra­phy pur­pos­es for 10 years. Its mod­u­lar ar­chi­tec­ture in­creas­es the beam en­er­gy by quar­ter of a mega­volt step: each cell de­liv­ers a 75ns im­pul­sion of 250kV am­pli­tude. Our aim is to guar­an­tee a min­i­mum life­time for the cells and their pulse driv­er. To achieve it, we are op­er­at­ing a test-bed at a mod­er­ate­ly low rep­e­ti­tion rate (a cou­ple of puls­es per minute) for tens of thou­sands of puls­es. Af­ter­wards, we will run a se­ries of both non-de­struc­tive and de­struc­tive anal­y­sis to iden­ti­fy the most stressed parts, and, if nec­es­sary, the means of in­creas­ing the cell life­time. This paper de­scribes the test-bed: a pair of cells and its driv­er, and the first re­sults of these age­ing tests.