First Quarter of Booster is Powered
Roy Billinge
Progress continues to be made by the men and women working towards completion of the Booster in the NAL accelerator system -- that vital intermediate accelerator that will give the protons 8 BeV energy as they are bound for the Main Ring.
On Friday evening, July 31, powering of the first quarter of the rapid-cycling synchrotron was accomplished. Roy Billinge, Booster section leader, explained that "the endeavor involved virtually everyone in the Booster section and represented a very significant step toward completion of this accelerator."
The first section of the Booster ring was powered to a magnetic field equivalent to 8 BeV.
The occasion also marked the first successful operation of NAL's central control system using the new "control language." Simple instructions such as "set magnet on" were typed into the control computer to turn on the power supply and adjust the magnetic field level in the quarter-ring. The control computer routed these messages to a "mini-computer" in the West Booster Gallery which then interpreted them and sent commands to the appropriate interface module. The module then translated and stored the required conditions in a suitable form to operate the power supply.
Billinge said that the next milestone on the Booster group calendar is to power one-half of their proton synchrotron during the month of September, prior to taking a beam from the Linac, bending it half the circle and passing it out to the Main Ring.
Incidentally, development of the new special "control language" for NAL was under the direction of Donald Edwards, Accelerator Theory, who is controls coordinator for the entire NAL Accelerator system. He worked with Lowell Klaisner and Keith Rich as a special controls task team in developing a computer language for the accelerator. The language will be used in the "mini" computers to be linked with the main computer center.