Developmental efforts of RF collinear load for 10 MeV, 6 kW travelling wave Linac

RRCAT is developing a 10 MeV, 6 kW Travelling Wave Electron Linac for radiation processing applications. The remnant RF power from the Linac structure is taken out by output RF coupler and absorbed by the waveguide load. RF collinear load is an improved technique for absorption of the remnant RF power. It replaces the output RF coupler, RF window and waveguide load leading to reduction in size of magnetic elements and less transverse beam instabilities. In addition, it uses the remnant RF power to increase the electron beam energy. The collinear load consists of a number of copper cavities coated with microwave absorbing material at inner surfaces and brazed to the Linac structure at the end. Development of the collinear load has been started at RRCAT and a prototype low power collinear load using Kanthal (FeCrAl alloy) coating has been developed. Further works are going on the development of high power collinear load using FeSiAl alloy. The paper describes the development of the Kanthal based prototype low power collinear load as well as the works for the development of FeSiAl alloy based high power collinear load. (author)