Speaker
Description
Metal additive manufacturing offers new opportunities for compact, normal-conducting linear accelerator components. This work investigates additively manufactured IH-type drift-tube structures, focusing on fabrication tolerances, post-processing, RF performance, and thermal management. Electromagnetic simulations and low-level RF measurements show that small geometric deviations can shifts in resonant frequency and changes in effective shunt impedance. Conformal cooling channels were then optimized through electromagnetic, thermal, and fluid-dynamic simulations and validated experimentally. The final design of the cooling channels achieved temperature and stable hydraulic behaviour under experimental boundary conditions, while also showing that the design on higher thermal loads shows better performance then some traditionally manufactured accelerator components. These results demonstrate that additive manufacturing can provide functional advantages beyond simplified production, with higher complexity and good performance under higher loads.