FRIB, East Lansing, Michigan, USA
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) has been commissioned, with rare isotopes first produced in December 2021 and first user experiments conducted in May 2022. The FRIB driver linear accelerator (linac) uses 6 room temperature cavities, 324 superconducting cavities, and 69 superconducting solenoids to accelerate ions to more than 200 MeV/nucleon. Because of the large scale, automation is essential for reliable linac operation with high availability. Automation measures implemented during linac commissioning include turn-on of the cavities and solenoids, turn-on and fast recovery for room temperature devices, and emergency shut down of linac devices. Additional automated tasks include conditioning of multipacting barriers in the cavities and calibration of the control valves for the pneumatic tuners. To ensure a smooth transition to operations, we are currently working on real-time health monitoring of the linac cryomodules, including critical signals such as X-ray levels, RF coupler temperatures, and cryogenic parameters. In this paper, we will describe our automation procedures, the implementation details, and the experience we gained.
