High power pulsed accelerators with potential industrial applications

Radiation processing sources fall into two categories, electron beams and nuclear decay products (gamma rays). Applications requiring high average power (> 100 kW), high dose rate, or limited deposition depth are performed with electrons. Typically, the electron sources that are used for radiation processing are either dc accelerators or linacs with peak powers in the 50 to 200 kW regime. Recent advances have made the development of pulsed electron sources in this parameter range attractive as well. Pulsed sources operate with space charge limited cold cathode emission on the microsecond or submicrosecond time scale. As a result, the dose rates are much higher than currently available. This paper will describe a design for a 10 MV, 100 kW or greater accelerator for large area electron beam irradiation or for bremsstrahlung conversion. The design is based on pulse transformers to generate megavolt, microsecond pulses, saturable magnetic core switching to compress to shorter pulse lengths, pulse-forming line adder techniques to transform to 10 MV, and a magnetically insulated cold cathode diode for electron beam formation. The status of these various technologies is reviewed