Status and Lesson Learned from Manufacturing of FPC Couplers for the XFEL Program

For the XFEL accelerator, Thales, RI research Instrument and LAL are working on the manufacturing, assembly and conditioning of Fundamental power couplers. 670 couplers has been manufactured. The main characteristics of these couplers are remained at 1.3 GHz. The paper describes the full production activity from the starting of the program We describe the lesson learned from a mass production of FPC coupler and different steps necessaries for obtaining a rate up to 10 couplers a week. we propose also some other way to be optimized for a future possible mass production of such components. With comparison of processes and adaptation which could benefit to an increase rate, if needed, including some of them which could be studies from the coupler definition to the manufacturing process in order to obtain a stable and possible increased rate or lower cost of production by decreasing the risks on programs. The status of the production curve during the program is also given