The Advanced Photon Source is a third generation light source that consistently provides beam reliability above 98% with MTBF in excess of 90 hours. This presentation will show how we use automated tools to acquire and interpret reliability data and how that data is used to prepare reports on machine reliability.
The European Spallation Source ERIC is currently under construction in Lund, Sweden. One of the main requirements for this facility is to have high operational availability in order to compete with the highly reliable performance of the nuclear reactors that it is intended to replace. During the last years, the design of the different subsystems has been crystallising and going through design...
The National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) at Michigan State University is a United States national user facility for rare isotope research and education in nuclear science, astro-nuclear physics, and accelerator science. The Coupled Cyclotron Facility at NSCL, consisting of two coupled cyclotrons, accelerates stable ion beams to energies of up to 170 MeV/u. Rare isotope beams...
The J-PARC facility has been running an accelerator since 2007 and it has been about 10 years since. Since the facility is close to the coastline and is built on soft ground, it was hit hard by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Maintenance of various infrastructures is required due to aftereffects and aging. In this report, we will report on the current situation of infrastructure...
SOLEIL has pioneered the use of RF solid state power amplifiers (SSPA’s), 1 x 35 kW in its Booster and 4 x 180 kW in its Storage Ring at 352 MHz. After 11 years of operation, these SSPA's, which were developed in house, have demonstrated that they could advantageously replace the vacuum tubes in such CW application thanks in particular to their inherent modularity/redundancy, the absence of HV...
The Machine Protection Software Team has been using a Continuous Delivery workflow for numerous years, covering shutdown and physics activities of the LHC. This continuous delivery workflow relies on numerous practices that are necessary to ensure the automated validation of the software products: unit tests, automated user acceptance tests, static code analysis, quality tracking, etc. This...
ALBA is a third generation synchrotron light source near Barcelona (Spain). In operation for users since 2012, we aim at continuously improve the beam availability by increasing the mean time between failures and decreasing the time to recover the beam. . Here we present our experience with PANIC; an alarm handler that puts on alert the accelerator control room crew when a subsystem or a beam...
Dipole magnets at ISIS are utilised in the Synchrotron particle accelerator to steer the 800MeV proton beam and maintain a circular trajectory within the 163m ring. Such is the importance of these magnets that failure of a single Dipole terminates the beam current, resulting in costly machine downtime. ISIS currently employs a simplistic form of condition monitoring to assess magnet health...
The Beijing Electron Positron Collider II (BEPCII) is a double-ring e+e- collider running in the tau-charm energy region (Ecm = 2.0-4.6 GeV), with a design luminosity of 1 × 1033 cm-2s-1 at the beam energy of 1.89 GeV, which had been achieved on April 5th 2016. The failure analysis system of the BEPCII has two subsystems to get the designated signals when the beam loss: the multiple channel...
TRIUMF uses the TapRooT® System for failure investigation. TapRooT is a systematic process for finding the root causes of problems: major accidents, everyday incidents, minor near-misses, quality issues, human errors, etc
In my talk I’ll introduce the TapRooT system and illustrate its use for the investigation of failures.
iThemba LABS will be celebrating 30 years of operation with the K200 separated sector cyclotron (SSC) in 2017. This accelerator has produced charged particle beams for radioisotope production, nuclear physics research and medical radiation therapy very reliably over the years. iThemba LABS also operates two electrostatic accelerators. As a result of aging equipment, the number of interruptions...
The GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH at Darmstadt, Germany, operates three accelerators, the main linac UNILAC (UNIversal Linear ACcelerator), the heavy ion synchrotron SIS18 and the experimental storage ring ESR. The ‘Facility for Anti-Proton and Ion Research’ (FAIR) which is presently under construction, extends and supersedes the existing GSI. Major service and upgrade...
The Collider Accelerator Department (CAD) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which includes the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), has been in operation for 57 years. For the past 17 years, production at RHIC has been the major focus, but new goals loom on the horizon. In this paper and presentation, I will discuss, compare and contrast early methods to those used in the modern era here...
Space-borne instrumentation has entered a maturity age with standards, methods and workmanships that grant instrument lifetimes exceeding ten years without maintenance. This has been achieved through the adoption of a common technical reference imposed by space agencies to all segments of a space mission.
I will shortly expose this reference with associated methods and how our lab...
Automotive has since long faced the need for a strong reliability, leading to cars that seldom fail and have enlarged maintenance intervals. The subject was complexified when electronics entered in the automotive controls, requiring to elaborate specific methods, processes and tools to handle the dependability in all its aspects:
- Reliability, through management of the reliability of the...
Round-table discussion about Reliability, maintenance, quality in Accelerator, Self-driving car, spaceborne instrumentation.
The Canadian Light Source had first light in 2004 and has been shining since then. Achieving high operational reliability and availability is done through periodic monitoring of benchmark statistics and having a responsive organizational structure that can push these statistics in the right direction. Reliability is further enhanced through mitigating the risk of infrastructure failures and...
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN relies on more than 9000 superconducting magnets working since September 2008 in order to produce physics at high energy. The experience accumulated has shown up the frequency of electrical faults in the superconducting magnets, as well as their protection and instrumentation circuits. An internal collaboration group within CERN has carried out a first...
In our therapy center, accelerators (linacs and the synchrotron with the maximum energy of 400MeV/u) have been dedicated for carbon radiotherapy. The number of treated patients has exceeded 2,000 in this May.
The beam extracted from the synchrotron is transported to each treatment room and at upstream of the irradiation devices, a couple of dose monitor are located to control the dose...
The Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF) is an intermediate energy light source built at Zhang-Jiang Hi-Tech Park in Shanghai, China. The SSRF consists of a 432 m and 3.5 GeV storage ring with a 2.9 nm-rad emittance. The RF power and voltage required for storing the electron beam are provided by means of three SC cryomodules, each containing one 499.654MHz superconducting cavity. The...
The primary function of the Large Hadron Collider beam loss monitoring system is to protect the accelerator components from damage due to unacceptable beam losses. It acquires data from 4000 ionisation detectors distributed along the accelerator tunnel using radiation tolerant front-end electronics linked to surface electronics that perform continuous real-time processing. To connect these two...
The Collider-Accelerator Department’s Main Control Room Operators at Brookhaven National Laboratory have long used an alarm display as a first-line diagnostic for failures in our accelerator chain, as well as a tool to prevent or minimize downtime. Our method of monitoring and tracking alarms has evolved as the accelerator complex has grown, and with new systems being commissioned the burden...
FLD, “First Line Diagnosis”, is the ISIS fault diagnosis tool and technical knowledge base, which has undergone a recent system-wide upgrade. FLD 2.2, like previous versions, contains a wide range of online operational resources, from fault analysis flowcharts and repair procedures to risk assessments and video tutorials. This valuable information is curated by equipment specialists spanning...
PROSCAN is a proton irradiation facility for tumor treatment at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland; it is in operation since 2007. At the heart of the facility is COMET, a compact, super-conducting 250 MeV cyclotron. The facility serves three Gantries for generic tumor treatment, OPTIS 2 for eye cancer treatment and the proton irradiation facility (PIF) for radiation resistance tests...
Our own experience as well as that of other organizations is that it is possible to efficiently model the operational activities of groups with very different activities (from technical groups to scientific teams) with notions sumarized in six different types of process which are incidents, problems, service requests, requests for changes, changes, interventions. The aim of this modeling is to...
Overall machine reliability and availability are important objective of any accelerator and that depends on individual components reliability and skill of operators. However, the only presence of beam in a storage ring is not adequate enough to validate a reliable operation, but providing beam with desired quality is utmost important for the synchrotron radiation source serving a large and...
Often in well-established facilities, operational processes have not been reevaluated since their infancy. Some of these processes must be re-evaluated to increase performance, efficiency, and maintain reliability. Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) supports a fast neutron target that must be replaced every two years and aligned to the beam path. The previous alignment process required...
In 2016, Ghana's with assistance of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) installed a 1.7MV 5SDH-2 Pelletron accelerator donated by Government of Netherlands through a technical co-operation agreement. A new beam line is installed on the 15degree port at the high energy end of the accelerator and connected to an RC-43 multipurpose chamber with IBA capability. This study provides a summary...
Empresarios Agrupados (EA) has been contributing to different EU funded projects regarding the reliability of high-power particle accelerators. Previous projects are the Eurotrans/Max project and studies currently continue with the activities for the Myrte project. For the Myrte project the reliability of the Myrrha Linac is taken into account from the early design stage, using relevant data...
A high degree of beam stability is essential for the smooth operation of an active scanning system as applied by the Heidelberg Ion Beam Therapy Centre (HIT). Amongst other parameters such as particle intensity and beam width, the feedback controlled beam position at the isocentre is particularly crucial as it has to meet a very tight tolerance band of ±1.0 mm. Due to this fact we pay special...
Maintenance and upgrades of the magnet power supplies are a critical consideration for our facility since the injector complex is already 10 years old and main of the storage ring equipment are approaching the same age.
This presentation first focuses on the main maintenance operations carried out on these systems, which represent more than 600 power converters. Two important reliability...
The existing GSI Main Control Room (MCR) is used for the accelerator complex operation since 20 years. In this time no major updates to its equipment and layout have been done. As its design, size and functionality cannot meet the requirements for running the upcoming FAIR accelerator facility, the planning for a modern fully digital control room is presently ongoing. The construction of a new...
At National Institute of Radiological Sciences (NIRS), carbon-ion radiotherapy has been carried out since June 1994. Recently, the world's first superconducting rotating-gantry was developed, and further installed in the new treatment facility at NIRS. This gantry equips ten superconducting magnets, and can transport carbon ions to an isocenter over irradiation angles of between ±180 degrees....
SOLEIL control system is running for 10 years on accelerators and beamlines. It has been designed with an object-oriented architecture both for software and hardware. Electronics devices have been standardized by functionalities allowing to build the control system with a “LEGO” approach. These electronics connected to the Tango framework are mainly based on industrial off-the-shelf devices: ...
The Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF) has opened to user for eight years, and the performance has been improved continuously to satisfy the users’ needs. The operation performance and the reliability of SSRF have been kept in high level to provide users sufficient and stable synchrotron radiation laser. The report will focus on the operation performance of SSRF in last operation...
Hefei Light Source (HLS) has successfully finished a major upgrade project and has been officially opened to users since January 2016. The planned operation time of the year 2016 for Hefei Light Source is 7008 hours and the planned user time is 4752 hours. The actual operation time and user time is 7009 hours and 5019 hours, respectively. The machine down time is much less than the planned...
Using HOM free superconducting cavities and high power solid state amplifiers, both developed in house, the SOLEIL storage ring 352 MHz RF system was quite innovative. After more than ten years of operation, it has proved itself; the assessment of the operational experience and of the upgrades which were brought in are reported here.
The Nuclear Sciences and Radiation-Matter Interaction Laboratory (SNIRM) at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Sciences and Technology Houari Boumediene (USTHB) is engaged in the acquisition of a tandem ion accelerator in the range of a few MeV. This facility will be located on the USTHB site. The characteristics of the accelerator have been defined and relate mainly to the...
After six years of operation, equipment located close to some vacuum chambers of the SOLEIL storage ring started to show unexpected damages due to radiation. It has been pointed out that, around the so called “quadrupole” vacuum chambers that intercept upstream dipole synchrotron radiation, X-rays are emitted. Their energy is too high to be significantly attenuated by the 3mm aluminum of which...
This project relates to the restoration of the copper electrode of a resonator at GANIL. It makes following important problems of corrosion of the copper pipes.
- Refurbishment of the DEE of a cavity in cooper for a compact cyclotron
- Thermal computation
- Implementation
- Manufacturing
- Three axe control
- RF qualifications
- Commissionning
The Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) is a multipurpose facility for the physical experiments. The J-PARC facilities were constructed in the Tokai site of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA). The accelerator complex consists of a linac, a 3 GeV Rapid-Cycling Synchrotron (RCS), and a 50 GeV Main Ring synchrotron (MR). RCS delivers the beams to the neutron target and MR, and...
The SPIRAL1 facility at GANIL produces radioactive ions beams (RIB) since 2001. Target Ion Source Systems (TISS) employed are exposed to severe dose rates, requiring both simple and radiation hard technologies. Moreover, the production is performed in a Nuclear Installation Plant, where all the processes must cope with constraining safety rules. Once the TISS is irradiated by primary beams of...
The 'Facility for Anti-Proton and Ion Research' (FAIR) which is presently under construction, extends and supersedes the existing GSI. In July 2016 began longest shutdown GSI has ever seen. The main work package is the civil construction project GAF (GSI Anbindung an FAIR, Link of GSI to FAIR) which comprises additional shielding of SIS18,fire protection measures, as well as the connection of...
The high frequency power provided by high-voltage modulator designed with vacuum tubes, serves to accelerate the electron beam in the section formed by copper cavities. Some of the remaining power is dissipated in the cavities and metallic components of the modulator such as PFN, tubes, power supplies.
These components are cooled by a circulation of water. The importance of regulating the...
Overall since starting to use RCFA on all trips we have seen our annual MTBF increase from around 24 hrs to above 100 hrs.
However we have mixed experience with reactions to requiring a root cause failure analysis is performed on all major systems failures on Diamond. Ideally we get clear identification of the causes and a practical set of actions to address them, but this is not always the...
SOLARIS is a National Synchrotron Research Center built at the Jagiellonian University Campus in Krakow, Poland. It is a green field project that was funded from the EU Structural Funds with the total budget of 50 M€ covering the cost of the building, people, 600 MeV linac with the transfer line, 1.5 GeV storage ring with the circumference of 96 m and two beamlines. The machine was constructed...
SOLEIL is the national French synchrotron, in operation since 2007: 27 beamlines provide photons to the users more than 5000 hours. For this instrument that operates a 24/7 beam and whose availability rate is of over 98%, the issue of maintenance is essential. First, it is necessary to ensure optimal operating condition because the equipment is becoming older and older. Then, preventive...
Synchrotron SOLEIL is the 3rd generation French synchrotron light source. In operation since 2007, it provides photon beams to the 29 beamlines in operation whose intensity can reach 500 mA according to the filling (5 different modes are available).
After early age failures, the efforts to improve the reliability of the equipment and the availability of the beam contributed to bring us close...
Most important ingredients of reliability in particle-therapy accelerators like HIMAC are reproducibility of a treatment beam as well as prevention of unexpected down time.
In order to realize reliable operations of medical accelerators, we take trend data of many parameters. For example, water flow of magnets has been readjusted during biweekly maintenance according to recent trend data, so...
The Marburg Ion-Beam Therapy Center is Germany's second facility providing a highly precise cancer treatment with hydrogen and carbon ions using the raster scanning method. The accelerator control system is part of a medical product resulting in strict constraints which must be considered in each maintenance step of the accelerator control system. Furthermore, the medical application...
Gunma University Heavy Ion Medical Center has provided a carbon ion radiotherapy by a compact carbon ion accelerator since 2010. Carbon ions are generated in a permanent-magnet ECR ion source and accelerated in RFQ linac and APF-IH linac. The carbon ions are accelerated up to 400 MeV/u in a synchrotron and extracted to treatment rooms with a beam intensity of 1.3×10^9 particles per second....
From now seven years, Institut Curie-CPO has a shared contract of maintenance with the supplier of his Particle Therapy facility. The two main reasons of this decision were: 1. the connection of this new device to the two historic beamlines 2. the existing local team already involved in Particle Therapy Equipment, including the particle accelerator. We will mainly describe:
- the principles...
Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) has moved into production running after completing the 12 GeV upgrade. In many instances, new equipment has been integrated into the original CEBAF infrastructure and systems. Some challenges and opportunities have presented themselves during and following commissioning of the "new" machine that have prompted Jefferson Lab...
Long term reliability is critical for any successful particle accelerator operation. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is now faced with a reliability challenge owing to age, continual performance improvements, and even best practice design considerations. This presentation will focus on our experience with the RHIC quench protection diodes; a passive part of the machine protection...
The K1200 cyclotron is part of the Coupled Cyclotron Facility (CCF) at National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). It was built starting in 1987 and produced its first standalone beam in 1989. The expected life of the K1200 was estimated to be 20 years. In 2017, 28 years first beam, the K1200 continues to produce extremely useful science. As the cyclotrons age, maintaining their...
The beam commissioning of the J-PARC 3 GeV Rapid Cycling Synchrotron (RCS) has been started since 2007, and the proton beams were delivered to a neutron target and a main ring synchrotron on Dec. 2008. At the beginning of RCS operation, an availability of RCS was depressed by a discharge of a thyratron which used in a power supply system of the extraction kicker magnet. We investigated the...
The 12GeV upgrade at Jefferson Lab doubled the energy reach of the lab’s recirculating accelerator. To meet the upgrade requirements, ten new C100 style cryomodules were added to the linacs to supply the additional energy reach. Each C100 was designed to provide 100MeV of acceleration capability plus a 10% margin; twice that of 6GeV era cryomodules . Acceptance testing of the first C100 showed...
Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) is home to cyclotron-based high intensity proton accelerator facility HIPA, which presently delivers a maximum of 1.4 MW beam power. Detailed analysis on unexpected outages due to various failures is presented and how the failure rate of each subsystem evolved over the years. Main severe events (interlocks malfunction, vacuum, discharge problems, failures of...
The machine protection strategy at ESS is an important component in reaching the high availability goals of the facility. Machine protection at ESS follows a holistic functional protection lifecycle to define, analyze, implement, monitor, and adjust the different protection-related systems at the appropriate stage. One key pillar in this lifecycle is the fit-for-purpose protection analysis...
Highly reliable systems rely on methodical procedure during the design phase, production and deployment. This paper presents a methodology that covers production quality, reception tests and field analysis on the example of the mass produced accelerator control system for the LHC (FGClite). The production quality analysis of each board consists of functional tests based on the PXI test...
