LBNL, Berkeley, California
Funding: Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.
ALS has been upgraded by adding Top-Off Mode, a new mode of operation to the existing modes of Fill and Stored Beam. The Top-Off Mode permits injection of 1.9GeV electron beam into the Storage Ring, with the safety shutters open, once certain strict conditions are met and maintained. Top-Off Mode enables User operation without an interruption caused by mode switching between the Stored Beam Mode when safety shutters are open, to the Fill Mode with the safety shutters closed and back. The conditions necessary to permit Top-Off Mode are; stored beam is present, the energies are matched between the injector and storage ring, a select set of storage ring lattice magnets are operating at the correct current levels, and radiation losses are minimized. If certain combinations of these conditions are not met, a potentially dangerous condition of injecting electrons down a users beam line can exist. Therefore a system of mode control, energy match, lattice match and stored beam interlocks are needed to control the injected beam prohibiting potentially dangerous conditions. In this paper we will present the Top-Off Mode Beam Interlock system requirements, design, and operational parameters.
LBNL, Berkeley, California
Funding: This work was supported by the Director, Office of Science, U. S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.
The upgrade of the Advanced Light Source to enable top-off operation has been ongoing for the last four years. Activities over the last year have centered around radiation safety aspects, culminating in a systematic proof that top-off operation is equally safe as decaying beam operation, followed by commissioning and full user operations. Top-off operation at the ALS provides a very large increase in time-averaged brightness to ALS users (by about a factor of 10) as well as improvements in beam stability. The presentation will provide an overview of the radiation safety rationale, commissioning results, as well as experience in user operations.
LBNL, Berkeley, California
Funding: Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.
The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a third generation synchrotron light source that has been operating since 1993 at Berkeley Lab. Recently, the ALS was upgraded to achieve Top-Off Mode, which allows injection of 1.9GeV electron beam into the Storage Ring approximately every 30 seconds. The ALS Top-Off Mode Beam Current Interlock System was installed to prevent the potential hazard of injected electrons propagating down user beam lines. One of the requirements of this interlock system is a fast response time from detected event to injection trigger inhibit. Therefore, solid state devices, not electro-mechanical relays typically used in accelerator safety systems, must be used to implement the trigger inhibit logic. An FPGA-based solution was selected for this function. Since commercial FPGAs are not rated for high reliability or fail-safe operation, some of the logic resources were used to perform system self-checking to reduce the time to detect system failures and increase reliability. The implementation and self-checking functions of the Extraction Trigger Inhibit Interlock System will be discussed.