Nagoya & Kyoto, Japan, 20-24 January 2014

The New Year brought a very important event for the IFMIF agenda: the 6th International IFMIF Workshop, kindly hosted by the universities of Nagoya and Kyoto, from Monday 20 to Friday 24 January 2014, where the most recent advances and achieved milestones of our project were shared among the community. In particular, the recent achievement of the IFMIF IIEDR (Intermediate IFMIF Engineering Design Report) submitted on schedule on June 2013, stamping the end of the IFMIF Engineering Design Activities, was thoroughly covered during the first day. Also, the on-going activities on the different EVEDA prototyping subprojects were discussed, with special relevance to the latest advances of the LIPAc accelerator, which installation is about to start.
The time we all passed together reinforced the links and allowed lots of valuable parallel discussions to exchange ideas and to clarify points of view, which are essential for the important coming milestones that we will have to overcome in the next months. Our project is entering a decisive phase but the global enthusiasm shared these days in Nagoya and Kyoto reflect a strong will to face the difficulties ahead, and are a foretaste of the coming successes.

Link to the workshop agenda

Rokkasho, Japan, 26-28 November 2014

The 6th LIPAc Technical Meeting (LTM06) was held in Rokkasho, BA site Fusion Energy Research Center (Japan), from 26th to 28th November 2014.

More than 40 participants, from CEA (Saclay, France), INFN (Legnaro, Italy), JAEA (Rokkasho, Japan), CIEMAT (Madrid, Spain), F4E (Garching, Germany) and PT of IFMIF/EVEDA attended the meeting to discuss progress in the design, manufacturing, installation and commissioning of the LIPAc (Linear IFMIF Prototype Accelerator).

Much technical information was exchanged by the various presenters, showing the status of the different components. After the previous LTM05, held in Legnaro (Italy), a lot of progress has been made, demonstrating the strong effort of the entire LIPAc community in Japan and Europe.

Important milestones were reached in the project and presented in detail during the meeting:

• Injector First Plasma! On 23th of October 2014. The first plasma was produced with 80W of RF power and a gas flow of 1.9 sccm at 75kV. The following day the RF power was incrementally to 130W.
• Injector First H+ Beam (Accelerator Vault was set under controlled area) 4^th November 2014 at 16:18 the first beam was extracted; H+ Beam at 70KeV/40mA, 46.7 mA, Faraday cup current 100 ms/s 10% duty. In the two following days of Injector commissioning were reached 105mA of beam current, great result!
• The RF power systems; 8 HVPS dedicated to the RFQ have already been manufactured, three of them have already been tested, and the remaining five are ready for test. They are expected to be delivered to Rokkasho in the first trimester of 2015.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Key MEBT components are already integrated and the conditioning of the buncher is progressing well. The MEBT is expected to arrive in Rokkasho after summer 2015.

• The LPBD final report was delivered and design for manufacture is now ongoing. The cooling system was confirmed stand-alone system, and the licensing strategy clarified.

  

• The SRF Linac design is basically finished and manufacturing contracts for the critical components are now being placed. The licensing strategy is ongoing…
• The D-Plate will be completely assembled by the end of 2014 and ready for shipment after summer in 2015.
• The HEBT and Beam Dump main components have been completely designed, the associated technical specifications are nearing completion and several manufacturing contracts have been launched.
• PPS-MPS and LCS are now in operation controlling the injector operation, some modifications will be necessary for the next phase.

A site visit of the Accelerator Prototype Building was held, so all participants could see the installed injector. The injector was assembled by JAEA and their subcontractor, with the assistance of CEA experts, positively demonstrating the close collaboration between all parties.

We are now eagerly awaiting the end of the commissioning phase of the Injector, with an expected completion date of July 2015. The next step will be the installation of the RF power system components, followed by the installation of the RFQ, MEBT, D-plate and LPBD. Since it was announced the arriving of a wealth of components in 2015, we must be all ready for their installation in parallel with other activities.

 

See you next LTM07 in Rokkasho:

LTM07 is planned for the 15th -19th June 2015, and will be held again in Rokkasho (Japan).