Accelerators for Industrial and Medical Applications
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The ADS & AIMA story
Rubbia group at CERN
Since 1994 a collaboration was set-up between the Cyclotron Laboratory in Nice and the CERN group of Professor Carlo Rubbia (Nobel 1984 and former CERN Director General) for design studies of various high intensity cyclotron-based drivers for the « Energy Amplifier » project for nuclear energy production and transmutation of nuclear waste. The key concept was to drive a subcritical nuclear reactor by a high power proton accelerator to produce a large flux of spallation neutrons. The « Energy Amplifier » was the historical pionneer of the so-called now Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS)
In 2001, the AIMA Company was funded and it was awarded two important contracts for designing specific ADS project.
Design (380 MeV-10 mA) cyclotron
LAESA-Spain
This high power cyclotron was designed to drive a pebble-bed reactor for nuclear waste transmutation.
Cyclotron driver
TRADE project
The TRADE (TRiga Accelerator Driven Experiment) project was set-up by the ENEA (Italy) and CEA (France) for an experiment to be performed in the TRIGA reactor of the ENEA-Casaccia Center. It consisted in the coupling of an external proton accelerator to a target to be installed in the core of the reactor scrammed to sub-ctricality.
The AIMA Company was selected by ENEA for producing a preliminary conceptual design of a 115 MeV-2 mA superconducting cyclotron based on molecular hydrogen ions acceleration to deliver by stripping the high power proton beam.
High power concept
The Single Stage Cyclotron Driver (S2CD™) concept
AIMA patented a separated sectors cyclotron concept having uncomparable skills that any existing high power cyclotron for a much lower cost that any solution that has ever been proposed.
It stems from a new cyclotron coils shape which produces a decreasing magnetic field in valleys from positive to negative field. This allows acceleration of particles from 0 to high energies in a single cyclotron with a limited number of magnetic sectors.
By reducing the spiral of the magnetic sectors this concept leaves enough place in valleys to house efficient classical dual gap RF accelerating cavities.
The magnetic field is very low in the center, then it is associated with a patented multi-injection line system that push away the current limitation of cyclotron due to space charge effect, and let the possibility to use ion sources in parallel, increasing the reliability by avoiding the risks of beam trips when using a single ion source.
Moreover the reversed valley field concept allows to reach a very high beam extraction efficiency, which of the utmost importance for avoiding beam losses in this process.
Depending on the required maximum energy, e.g. for Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS) for subcritical nuclear systems, beam power in the range from 5 to 10 MWatt is within the reach of this S2CD innovative concept which is characterized by a mandatory high yield (slightly more than 20%!) of the accelerator driver.
... And an S2CD is compact and can be housed in 400 square meters.
For physics & Industry
AIMA high power machine can reach hundreds of MeVs, very high currents, and be designed to accelerate proton, H2+ alphas, or heavier particles. That opens its capabilities to be the right machine for fundamental physics as well as for industry.