A novel approach to increasing the reliability of accelerator magnets

When a very large particle accelerator with about 8000 electromagnets, such as the proposed Next Linear Collider (NLC), has an 85% overall availability goal, then all these magnets and their power supplies must be highly reliable and/or quickly repairable. An interdisciplinary reliability engineering approach, more commonly applied to aircraft and space vehicles, has been taken to design maximum reliability in the NLC main linac quadrupoles, while maintaining magnetic field performance and reducing cost. A specially assembled team of engineers with a variety of experiences with magnets carried out a failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) on a standard SLAC quadrupole magnet system. This process helped them identify which components were less reliable. Then they redesigned the quadrupole to avoid all the potential problems. A prototype magnet will be made and tested to ensure that functionality has not been lost.