RECENT ADVANCES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF HIGH AVERAGE POWER INDUCTION ACCELERATORS FOR INDUSTRIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL APPLICATIONS

Short-pulse accelerator technology developed during the early 1960's t hrough the late 1980's is being extended to high average power systems capable of use in industrial and environmental applications. Processe s requiring high dose levels and/or high volume throughput will requir e systems with beam power levels from several hundreds of kilowatts to megawatts. Beam accelerating potentials can range from less than 1 Me V to as much as 10 MeV depending on the type of beam, depth of penetra tion required, and the density of the product being treated. This pape r addresses the present status of a family of high average power syste ms, with output beam power levels up to 200 kW, now in operation that use saturable core switches to achieve output pulse widths of 50 to 80 nanoseconds. Inductive adders and field emission cathodes are used to generate beams of electrons or x-rays at up to 2.5 MeV over areas of 1000 cm(2). Similar high average power technology is being used at les s than or equal to 1 MeV to drive repetitive ion beam sources for trea tment of material surfaces over 100's of cm(2).