Analysis and Synthesis of the SNS Superconducting RF Control System

Abstract

The RF system for the SNS superconducting linac consists of a superconducting cavity, a klystron, and a low-level RF (LLRF) control system. For a proton linac like SNS, the field in each individual cavity needs to be controlled to meet the overall system requirements. The purpose of the LLRF control system is to maintain the RF cavity field to a desired magnitude and phase by controlling the klystron driver signal. The Lorentz force detuning causes the shift of the resonant frequency during the normal operation in the order of a few hundreds hertz. In order to compensate the Lorentz force detuning effects, the cavity is pre-tuned into the middle of the expected frequency shift caused by the Lorentz force detuning. Meanwhile, to reduce the overshoot in the transient response, a feed-forward algorithm, a linear parameter varying gain scheduling (LPV-GS) controller, is proposed to get away a repetitive noised caused by the pulsed operation as well as the Lorentz force detuning effects.