The NLC - Page 2

03-24-2006, 05:43 PM

Quote:

Choobus wrote

Quote:

logarithm wrote

And, Choobus, I have not put oil in a klystron or gyratron in almost twenty years. But you still can't beat tubes for overall power.

True, but they are fucking expensive to maintain, and those bastard power supplies break all the time. I used to work on a 100 MeV linac at LLNL and the duty cycle betyween running and down for repair was about 1:5. A nice reliable solid state system is much more useful than a bastard beast that only works 20% of the time.

Yeah, about the same as an easily-maintained fighter jet. The F-14 was something like 50 hours maintenance per hour of flight time, and the F-18 is about 15. But then for tubes, what do you expect, with ~ 80 kV and 10 amps input? SOB sat in a 400-gallon tank of oil for cooling...and if we had waveguide arcing (common, especially at 10^-9 Torr), the bitch threw it all into the biggest freakin' capacitor-inductor crowbar circuit you may have ever seen. It was two stories high. And, truth be known about it, solid state has come a LONG way. IIRC, Varian had gotten another of that particular gyratron tube cranked up to something like 360 kW. :O

Choobus · 03-25-2006, 03:32 PM

360 kW? What the fuck was that for? Even submersed in oil it still seems like it would be tough to dissipate all the heat.

03-25-2006, 04:23 PM

I'm not sure what they would have used that much RF power for. Ours ran at about half of that. Maybe those wacky EEs "just had to see how fast dad's car would go".