2018 SNS AAC & TAC Charge
Committee Charge and Responsibilities
The SNS Accelerator and Target operations enterprise made considerable progress in the past year, and a number of challenging issues were encountered and overcome. These included recovering from assembly difficulties related to the new Inner Reflector Plug (IRP-02), continued management of water leak(s) on the operational IRP (IRP-01), preparations for the conversion of Loop 4 on the IRP to heavy water operation, and fabrication, installation and commissioning of the small bubble helium gas injection initial implementation (GI3) for the mercury target (Pilat P2).
The delay in delivery and receipt inspection of IRP-02 required that the start of the long outage be delayed to the end of CY 2017. At cessation of operation on December 22, 2017, IRP-01 had reached an integrated exposure of 40.5 GW-Hr, resulting in significant and undesirable changes to the instrument neutron spectra from the burn-up of poison/decoupler materials (Gd/Cd). Also, receipt inspection of IRP-02 identified a small vacuum leak on the heavy water loop. Options to address this issue were evaluated and implemented prior to installation (Murdoch P7).
Installation of the GI3 hardware was completed on October 17, 2017, to support a successful external Accelerator Readiness Review. The GI3 system required new credited controls and hence required approval by the Department of Energy for commissioning. Three Pre-Start Action Items were addressed to permit scheduled turn-on, and a new target was operated for the months of November and December with gas injection. The expected target stress reduction related to gas injection was observed (Wendel P6).
The necessity to delay the long outage led to re-scheduling other initiatives such as AIP-34 (HVCM Controller Upgrades) and AIP-35 (Warm Linac Vacuum Upgrade) which were both completed in FY 2017 (Dodson P8). Plasma processing of additional cryomodules to improve gradients and beam energy, as well as the installation of the spare RFQ in the SNS front-end were delayed to the re-scheduled long outage (Kim A7, Moss A9). Delays in receiving FY 2017 budget authority (BA) for ongoing and new AIP projects impacted progress (Dodson P8).
The Beam Test Facility (BTF) used the spare RFQ to pursue a program of physics measurements including the first ever measurement of the full 6-D phase space of a charged particle beam (Cousineau A1, Aleksandrov A2). The BTF was dismantled in November 2017 to support relocation of the spare RFQ to the front-end of the SNS complex for installation during the long outage.
Fulvia Pilat joined ORNL on November 27, 2017, and assumed the responsibilities of Research Accelerator Division (RAD) Director and SNS Operations Manager on January 2, 2018. Kevin Jones retired March 1, 2018.
The Proton Power Upgrade (PPU) received Critical Decision 1 (CD-1) authorization from the Department of Energy (DOE) on April 4, 2018 (Galambos P4). At the end of FY 2017 SNS started to execute the klystron gallery chase insert site preparation work for PPU. This scope of work was added to the long outage. The recently released FY 2018 DOE-BES budget contains $36M in additional funding for PPU.
Progress in the winter 2018 outage has been excellent. The replacement RFQ and Inner Reflector Plug have both been installed and are undergoing testing (Johns P9).
RAD has continued to strengthen and expand project management of outage work to good effect. Substantial planning led to successful execution of the shorter 2017B/C outages and has supported a good start to the long 2018A outage (Johns P9).
SNS received the following Notable Outcomes in the 2018 DOE Performance Evaluation Management Plan (PEMP) for ORNL (Pilat P2).
Objective 2.1 Advance the PPU conceptual design and address prior review recommendations in preparation for CD-1 (Galambos P4).
Objective 2.4 Implement He gas injection of SNS targets and advance towards reliable 1.4 MW operations (Pilat P2, Cousineau P5, Wendel T1, Barbier T8).
At this stage of the fiscal year, the majority of work for both Notable Outcomes is complete. The only remaining element is to execute the Target Management Plan (Pilat P2) after recovery from the long outage in May 2018 to achieve scheduled operation at 1.4 MW beginning in late August 2018 (Pilat P2). To support this, SNS management adopted a new operating rhythm of three outages and target changes per year beginning in CY 2017 - as documented in the Target Management Plan - and continuing through the estimated start of PPU tunnel installation in 2021. This was also done to respond to requests from the scientific staff to reduce the length of the running periods.
Consequently, SNS accelerator and target-related activities over the next two years focus on two key objectives:
- By the end of FY 2018, achieve sustainable and predictable routine operation at or near 1.4 MW to the First Target Station (FTS) with availability against published schedule of ≥ 90% while using up to 3 target vessels per year (Pilat P2).
- Enable success of the Proton Power Upgrade project by providing key technical and management resources as required to meet project objectives (Galambos P4).
Charges:
- Are the SNS responses and ongoing actions to recommendations from the 2017 AAC meeting satisfactory? (Pilat P2)
Charge for Accelerator Systems:
- Do the capability and performance of the accelerator complex and neutron source support achieving Objective A? (Cousineau P5, Kim A7, White A8, Moss A9, Aleksandrov A10, Anderson A11, Norris and Eason A12)
- Is the Prioritization process and Project Planning strategy that has been developed and is in use for outage planning reasonable? (Johns P9)
- Is the scope of work identified for ongoing and future Accelerator Improvement Projects (AIP) appropriate and balanced between the competing interests of maintaining necessary margin for routine operation at 1.4 MW while addressing system obsolescence? (Dodson P8)
- Is the Accelerator R&D plan presented appropriately positioned to widen collaborations and to leverage external resource support? (Cousineau A1, Shishlo A3, Liu and Abudureyimu A4, Evans A5, Kim A7)
- Are the PPU pre-CD-2 activities properly focused? (Galambos P4, Kim A7, Moss A9, Anderson A11)
Charge for Target Systems:
- Is the SNS Target Management Plan a reasonable approach to improving both performance and understanding of SNS mercury targets? (Pilat P2, Wendel T1)
- Have lessons learned from the IRP-01 and IRP-02 experiences been adequately considered in the design and fabrication plan of the next-generation IRP (IRP-03)? (Murdoch P7, Janney T5)
- Is the major procurement planning sufficient for controlling long term cost and improving component manufacturing reliability? (Rosenblad T6)
- Is the proposal for early use of the 2 MW PPU target in operations reasonable? (Riemer T7)
- Do the benefits proposed from the PPU 2 MW target design changes outweigh additional potential complexities? (Wendel T1, Winder T3, Riemer T7)
