Titled "Solid-State Power Source for Advanced Accelerators and Industrial Applications," the project was housed at LLNL, but the component testing, electro-optical development, and machine shop work was performed at DOE/NV’s North Las Vegas facility.
Brooksby, whose contribution is in the area of mechanical design, created the architecture that has become the standard for solid-state pulsed power modulators that are being used in a variety of new applications such as the Stanford Linear Accelerator/Next Linear Collider and the DARHT Solid-State Kicker Pulser.
Saethre’s award was earned through his advancements in electro-optical power and control for the modulator. These technologies are being advanced in future designs and will become a fixture in future modulators.
Known as the "Oscars of Invention" and the "Nobel Prizes of Applied Research", the R&D 100 Awards are presented by the editors of R&D Magazine to recognize the 100 most technologically significant new products and processes of the year. Past winners have included breakthroughs like Polacolor film, the flashcube, the digital wristwatch, antilock brakes, the automated teller machine, the liquid crystal display, the halogen lamp, and the fax machine.
The ARM source is a full-scale demonstration of a unique modular architecture that enables extremely powerful scientific and industrial machinery to benefit from the speed, precision, agility, and reliability of modern solid-state devices. This winning technology was featured in R&D Magazine’s September issue, and was showcased during the 1999 R&D 100 Awards ceremony in Chicago, IL on September 23. The ARM accelerator is designed to produce bursts of x-rays that will help scientists to examine the effects of aging on the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile without the need for nuclear testing. The prototype source for ARM houses over 5000 transistors and delivers a burst of 165-megawatt pulses at a maximum pulse rate of 2 megahertz. When compared with the state-of-the-art in accelerator power systems, this source exceeds all previous performance records by a factor of 400 in repetition rate, or speed, and a factor of 1000 in pulse duty, or average power.
This project is the first application of solid-state power for high-current induction accelerators. The power source gives a single accelerator so much versatility that it performs as if it were many accelerators operating in parallel-at cost savings of $100 million per accelerator.
Contact: Elaine Mew at (702) 295-2943
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