Working Group on Accelerator Reliability Database

Background

Accelerator faults that result in a beam interrupt on the order of a second or longer are not acceptable for accelerator driven transmutation systems. Frequent beam interrupts not only disrupts the transmutation and electricity production efficiency but would result in thermal-fatigue in the target, multiplier, and cooling systems structure. Beam interrupts of different durations are important for different phenomena, but typically interrupts of very short duration (e/g. less than 100 ms) are inconsequential. Therefore, understanding the causes of the faults and improving the accelerator design to reduce the number of longer duration interrupts are of primary importance.

The Working Group will function under the Accelerator Reliability and Utilization subgroup of the Working Party on Partitioning and Transmutation (WPPT).

Working group objective, scope and deliverables

The objective of the Working Group is to produce a set of accelerator reliability guidelines that the ADS designers can use as part of the conceptual design.

Specifically, the scope includes the following activities:

• Develop an expert opinion on what the fault and interrupt rates would be if an accelerator were to be designed and built with today's technology and with high-reliability as a primary objective. In order to do so:
  
  
  • Collect the fault and beam interrupt data from representative accelerators being utilized around the world for various applications (emphasis is on high power machines in user facilities),
    
    
  • Analyze and sort to the extend possible the data by components or accelerator section resulting in failure, and by duration of the beam interrupt (groups of interest are, less than a second, a few seconds, tens of seconds, and longer duration);

The main deliverable of the Working Group will be an accelerator reliability report. The report schedule is provided in the table below.

Working group membership

The membership for the Working Group requires a strong background in the design and operation of high-power accelerators. Thus members will be chosen from institutions with a history on high power proton accelerator research, design and operation.

Initially, ten organizations/countries will form the working group

CEA (France) - Jean Michel Lagniel
CNRS (France) - Alex Mueller
DOE (LANL) (USA) - Rich Sheffield
INFN (Italy) - Paolo Pierini
IAP-Frankfurt (Germany) - Horst Klein
JAERI (Japan) - Nobuo Ouchi
KAERI (S. Korea) - Byung-Ho Choi
PSI (Switzerland) -Peter Sigg
IBA (Belgium) - Dirk Vandeplasche
RAL (UK) - Ian Gardner

The Working Group will be formed by one member from each participation state/organization. Additional member organizations/countries, that meet the above requirements, may be added to the Working Group in the future by consensus of the group.

Initially, the group will be chaired by Paolo Pierini (INFN, Italy) on behalf of the chairman of the Accelerator Utilization and Reliability subgroup under WPPT. The secretarial duties will be assumed by Dr. Byung-Chan Na from OECD/NEA.

Working group meetings

A minimum of two Working Group meeting per year will be held until the completion of the report, which is scheduled for January 2004.

The meeting location will be decided by the chairman through consultation of the working group members.

It is the chairman's responsibility to organize and conduct the meeting. Outside the Working Group members listed above, the attendance to the meetings is limited to people approved by the Working Group chairman. The chairman may invite subject matter experts to participate in certain meetings to assist the group members or to make specific technical presentations.

Working group documentation

Meeting minutes will be published within one month of each meeting. The meeting minutes will summarize the technical progress up to date and the specific discussions, conclusions and action items. A copy of the presentations made during the meeting will be attached to the minutes.

Meeting minutes are primarily used to track progress, share the preliminary data and to guide the work. The meeting minutes will contain preliminary data and will not be distributed outside the participating organization.

The main deliverable of the Working Group are the report revisions. The Working Group will publish the revisions after review and approval. Each contributing organization/country maintain full copyrights to the report revisions.

Working group budget and funding

The work performed under this working group will be funded by the participating organizations/countries out of their independent National research funds. The Working Group does not have a dedicated funding source.

In general no fund transfer is anticipated between the participating organizations/countries. Occasionally, small amounts of fund transfer may occur for items like sample shipment, sharing test facilities, etc…It is also expected that the Working Group will provide short term opportunities for visiting scientists in the form of resident researchers in various organizations. The funding for those kinds of activities will be negotiated on a case-by-case basis among the organizations involved.

For more Information on this Subgroup, please contact Claes Nordborg (Claes.Nordborg@oecd.org

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