ORNL RAD, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
ORNL, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Funding: SNS is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Over the past year the performance of the LBNL H- source has been improved to routinely produce 36 mA when averaged over 0.7 ms long pulses at 60 Hz, measured at the RFQ output of the Spallation Neutron Source accelerator. This is up from 25-30 mA during early 2008, and up from {10}-20 mA during 2007. Some of the recent gain was achieved with refined conditioning and cesiation procedures, which now yield peak performance within 8 hours of starting a source change. The ~10 mg released Cs is sufficient for 3 weeks of operation without significant degradation. Another recent gain comes from the elevated Cs collar temperature, which was gradually implemented to probe its impact on the performance lifetime. In addition, load resistors improve the voltage stability of the electron dump and the lenses, which now can be more finely tuned. The achieved gain allowed for lowering the RF power to ~50 kW for improved reliability. A beam current of 38 mA is required at SNS for producing neutrons with a proton beam power of 1.4 MW. In one case, after 12 days of 4% duty factor operation, 56 mA were demonstrated with 60 kW of RF power. This is close to the 59 mA required for 3 MW operations.
