Automatic retuning of superconducting linacs using LightWin

Plaais, A.*; Bouly, F.*; Froidefond, E.*; Lagniel, J.-M.*; Normand, G.*; Orduz, A. K.*; Yee-Rendon, B.; De Keukeleere, L.*; Van De Walle, J.*

Proceedings of 32nd Linear Accelerator Conference (LINAC 2024) (Internet), p.563 - 568, 2024/10

https://doi.org/10.18429/JACoW-LINAC2024-THXA001

Reliability is an important feature for high power particle accelerators. This is particularly true for Accelerator-Driven Systems (ADS), for that every beam interruption can strongly affect the availability of the nuclear reactor. Many of these outages come from the loss of accelerating cavities or of their associated systems. Cavity failures can be compensated for by retuning other cavities of the linac. Finding the ideal compensation settings is however a difficult challenge that involves beam dynamics and multi-objective optimisation, and which raises very different issues according to the linac under study. For instance in the SPIRAL2 linac, a lot of cavities are mobilized for the compensation and the search space has a very high number of dimensions. Plus, it has quite low margins on the longitudinal acceptance. Linacs for ADS (such as the Japan Atomic Energy Agency ADS or MYRRHA) have a specific fault-tolerance design which facilitate the optimisation, but cavities have to be retuned in a few seconds. Hence we developed LightWin, a tool to automatically and systematically find compensation settings for every cavity failure of any given linac. In this study, we will present LightWin latest developments as well as the compensation strategies that we developed for SPIRAL2 and ADS linacs, both from a beam dynamics and a mathematical point of view.

MYRRHA-MINERVA injector status and commissioning

Gatera, A.*; Belmans, J.*; Boussa, S.*; Davin, F.*; De Cock, W.*; De Florio, V.*; Doucet, F.*; Parez, L.*; Pompon, F.*; Ponton, A.*; et al.

Proceedings of 64th ICFA Advanced Beam Dynamics Workshop on High Intensity and High Brightness Hadron Beams (HB2021), p.186 - 190, 2022/04

https://doi.org/10.18429/JACoW-HB2021-WEBC3

Latest developments and strategies to compensate for cavity failure in superconducting linacs

Plaais, A.*; Bouly, F.*; Yee-Rendon, B.

no journal, , 

Reliability is a critical issue in high-power hadron accelerators, especially accelerator-driven hybrid reactors (ADS). As an example, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency-ADS (JAEA-ADS) ADS must have no more than 42 beam interruptions of more than 5 minutes per year. A significant number of failures are caused by acceleration cavities or associated system losses. These can be corrected by realigning the surrounding cavity or part of the accelerator. However, it is difficult to find a setting that compensates for failures within seconds. That's why we developed LightWin, a tool that allows you to pre-create a database of failure scenarios associated with specific linac configurations. This study presents various fault compensation strategies and his LightWin validation studies performed on superconducting linacs at MYRRHA and JAEA-ADS. We also discuss LightWin's versatility and efficiency, as well as the latest advances in low energy and high beam current compensation.