FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS AND FREQUENCY SHIFT STUDIES FOR THE BRIDGE COUPLER OF THE COUPLED CAVITY LINEAR ACCELERATOR OF THE SPALLATION NEUTRON SOURCE

The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) is an accelerator-based neutron scattering research facility. The linear accelerator (linac) is the principal accelerating structure and divided into a room-temperature linac and a superconducting linac. The normal conducting linac system that consists of a Drift Tube Linac (DTL) and a Coupled Cavity Linac (CCL) is to be built by Los Alamos National Laboratory. The CCL structure is 55.36-meters long. It accelerates H- beam from 86.8 Mev to 185.6 Mev at operating frequency of 805 MHz. This side coupled cavity structure has 8 cells per segment, 12 segments and 11 bridge couplers per module, and 4 modules total. A 5-MW klystron powers each module. The number 3 and number 9 bridge coupler of each module are connected to the 5-MW RF power supply. The bridge coupler with length of 2.5 {beta}{gamma} is a three-cell structure and located between the segments and allows power flow through the module. The center cell of each bridge coupler is excited during normal operation. To obtain a uniform electromagnetic filed and meet the resonant frequency shift, the RF induced heat must be removed. Thus, the thermal deformation and frequency shift studies are performed via numerical simulations in order to have more » an appropriate cooling design and predict the frequency shift under operation. The center cell of the bridge coupler also contains a large 4-inch slug tuner and a tuning post that used to provide bulk frequency adjustment and field intensity adjustment, so that produce the proper total field distribution in the module assembly. « less