Minutes of the REX integration meeting on WednesdayFriday,13.05.2005, 14.13.075.2005

 

 

Participants: Peter Butler, Pierre Delahaye, Thomas Sieber, Mats Lindroos (chair), Fredrik Wenander, Nikolai Trofimov, Nicolas David, Romain Savreux, Pierre Delahaye, Luis Fraile (chair), Pekka Suominen.

 

 

1. General Issues

-        Members of the vacuum and alignment group shall be invited to one of the next REX meetings to define the work at REX during the next shutdown. The status of the vacuum system is basically the same as during the startup in 2001. Realignment is definitely necessary in several sections of the machine.

-        Elias Villar Gomez has started to collect all the drawings of the REX components. Thomas will contact Munich and Heidelberg to provide the drawings of the accelerators and the electrostatic lenses. Fredrik has already the original files from Leuven for the beam diagnostics elements.

-        A summary of the Ni run last week has been written and can be found attached to these minutes.

-        Thomas distributed his final update of the 2005 REX budget. There are 30 kCHF left on the T131900 account as well as 30 kCHF on the physics group account. The Munich account is empty after the latest spendings for rf-spare parts. The priorities for the remaining purchases have to be defined between Pierre, Fredrik and Thomas. Fredrik will take responsibility for the budget planning after Thomas has left.

-        A member of the AB-RF-LR group should participate in the REX meetings in the future. Thomas will talk to Maurizio Vretenar concerning this.

 

-          Starting on Tuesday 17.05., we will have a daily short REX meeting at 16.00 in the ISOLDE kitchen to discuss the startup and the status of the running Xe experiment.

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2. Current REX Experiment. TRAP

-        Trap injection worked out well, showing an efficiency of about 50%.

-        We use the 68Cu19+ (A/q=3.579) and 70Cu19+ (A/q=3.684). EBIS efficiency is at 17%.

-        The Linac has been scaled from 70Ni to the Cu. After reducing the energy to 2.8  MeV/u, transmission and spot were worse than during the Ni run. Since retuning would take a lot of time the measurements continue at about 50% transmission.

-        The Cu run will continue until Tuesday morning.

-Pierre

-           and Fredrik had the problem of discharges in the trap, means there was more current measured at the exit than injected from the test source. Nicolas David found a broken cable at a transfer element. The bad contact was responsible for the discharges.

-The test ion source runs stable now after the regulation has been improved.

-The application for the frequency scan of the trap has to be improved.

 

 

 

 

3. TrapEBIS

-        The control system of the trap will be upgraded after the Cu run. After the current experiment there will be some test runs for continuous injection into the EBIS as well as for injection with rotating wall cooling.

-The bad transmission through the mass separator, which has been observed on Thursday, was partially caused by two switched cables in one of the steerers.

-There was again a problem with the cabling of the Wago module for the high voltage cassettes, which could be repaired by Nicolas.

-The transmission through the separator is at the moment 70- 80%, due to the high residual gas pressure, the current is about a factor 10 higher than usual.

-Stable beam for Linac optimization will be available on Monday.

-The baking after the run will be done now with the old NEG strips.

-One day is needed to optimize beam transport through the BTS.

-Dry injection (without electron beam and magnetic field) into the EBIS is still problematic because of the high noise level on the electrodes.

 

4. EBISLinac

-        The EBIS cathode is behaving very well, so the question was raised if we should skip the cathode change scheduled for mid August.

-        A Finnish student, Pekka Suominen will work together with Fredrik and Pierre on some charge breeder tests during the following months.

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-          BERTRONIX could not solve the principle problem of the limited power level of the 200 MHz amplifier. Also the unstable operation at 10% duty cycle is still a problem. The amplifier could be tuned to ~100kW output power on a dummy load. It is running quite stable now at 30Hz, 600us. So we can expect closed loop operation on the cavity at about 85 kW.

 

54. LinacControl System

-        The problems with the 200 MHz amplifier are still not solved. At the moment we have a reasonably stable operation at 10 Hz and 60 kW output power. We had to reduce the pulse length to 300 us, reduce the anode voltage to 14 kV and delicately adjust the grid voltages. This means we are running at less than 60% of the nominal power level and at a duty cyle of 0.3% (design: 10%). It should be possible to continue in this way until the end of the running period.

-        With the current mode of operation of the 200 MHz amplifier we can provide a 2.8 MeV/u beam for an A/=3.6 beam at a repetition rate of max. 10-15 Hz. It has to be decided if this is acceptable for the upcoming runs, means if it is possible to reach the required charge states.

-        Thomas will have a meeting next week with people from AB-RF and Mr. Pirkl to discuss current operation of the amplifier and long term repair plans.

 

6. Control System

-        The rf-control application done by Nikolai is performing very good, allowing automatic restart of the amplifiers, automatic A/q scaling, data saving, diagnostics of the rf-systems etc. Also the new FESA system on which the rf-control is based is running nicely stable since more than a week.

-        Nikolai reports that the control system for the power supplies is in principle in the same stadium as the rf-control system. For the power supplies development of control software in the OP group is required.

-The BD FEC is still stopping from time to time, Sylvestre Catin has been informed about this.

-Nikolai found that there are not enough Ethernet connections in the network rack, where he wants to connect his Front end computer.

 

 

Minutes by Thomas