Estimating the reliability of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) flash X-ray (FXR) machine

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), our flash X-ray accelerator (FXR) is used on multi-million dollar hydrodynamic experiments. Because of the importance of the radiographs, FXR must be ultra-reliable. Flash linear accelerators that can generate a 3 kA beam at 18 MeV are very complex. They have thousands, if not millions, of critical components that could prevent the machine from performing correctly. For the last five years, we have quantified and are tracking component failures. From this data, we have determined that the reliability of the high-voltage gas-switches that initiate the pulses, which drive the accelerator cells, dominates the statistics. The failure mode is a single-switch pre-fire that reduces the energy of the beam and degrades the X-ray spot-size. The unfortunate result is a lower resolution radiograph.