Thermomechanical responses of the drift tube to beam loss at the China spallation neutron source

Abstract

The China Spallation Neutron Source drift tube linac (DTL) is a high current intensity linear accelerator operated in pulsed mode. Beam loss is the most important cause of DTL performance degradation. Therefore, control of beam loss is very crucial to the linac’s commission and routine operation. The beam loss in beam pulse width (∼several hundreds of microseconds) can be regarded as an instantaneous process, which may cause the local temperature of the drift tubes (DTs) to exceed the melting point or the thermal stress to exceed the material yield strength, resulting in permanent damage to the DTs. RF heating and beam loss are two major heat sources of the DTs during operation. First, temperature rise due to RF power dissipation is evaluated in this paper. Then, the thermomechanical response due to beam loss at different energies is investigated. It is found that the 3-MeV beam loss has the greatest stopping power and causes the largest temperature rise to the DTs. The maximum beam current loss for different working conditions is analyzed by both analytical method and ANSYS simulations, and the details will also be discussed in this paper.