• G.I. Cancelo, A. Vignoni
  Fermilab, Batavia

Pulsed Linac accelerators are being designed powering a string of cavities from one klystron. A typical low level rf control loop controls the amplitude and the phase of the klystron's rf power; however, the loop cannot dynamically control individual cavity amplitude and phases. The problem is further complicated by the need to obtain the maximum possible acceleration from the rf unit. Proton Linacs (HINS, ProjectX) add extra complexity. A rf unit may need cavities operating at different synchronous phases. Particles travel cavities at increasing velocities, which implies different beam loading conditions. For pulsed proton Linacs amplitude and phase stability are crucial for beam stability. The usual steady state approach determines optimality conditions for minimum generator power as a function of rf parameters. This approach does not provide constant amplitude and phases when the beam is on. In this paper we propose a novel theory using the cavity transient response. The transient response allows setting flat cavity gradients (A and phi) for each cavity in the unit. The optimized rf parameters for the transient response are the cavity coupling parameter and cavity tuning angle.

• G.I. Cancelo, K.R. Treptow, A. Vignoni, T.J. Zmuda
  Fermilab, Batavia
• C. Armiento
  University of Pisa and INFN, Pisa

A multi cavity real time rf simulator and PID control has been implemented on a Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA. The rf simulator simulates an entire rf unit with up to 4 cavities connected to a single simulated klystron. Each cavity is allowed to have its own set of parameters, set point gradients, synchronous phases, and beam loadings. The simulator is built based on an interdependent electrical and mechanical model of a cavity. The electrical model is a 1st order differential equation in the complex phase space. The mechanical model is a 2nd order differential equation of the Lorentz force detuning on the cavities. Other spurious effects as microphonics and noises can be added using an external source or a memory table. The simulator has been optimized for size and utilizes only one Xilinx DSP block per cavity. A typical Virtex-4 has of the order of 100 DSP blocks. The simulator bandwidth is 1MHz which is plenty for niobium type superconducting cavities which have a loaded Q of about 3 million and a half bandwidth of about 250 Hz. The Real Time simulator is currently running on hardware comprised by an ESECON LLRF controller* and a Linux based VME processor.

*ESECON, 14 channel LLRF controller, Low Level Radio Frequency Workshop (LLRF07), Knoxville, Tennessee, October 22-25, 2007, presentation 031.