Designing Superconducting Magnets for Reliability and Availability

Abstract

The successful operation of accelerator systems such as the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) is limited by the ability of the system design engineer to design components, including the superconducting magnets, which are capable of extended operation under all encountered environmental conditions. The reliability of these critical magnet components can have a major impact on the availability of the SSC, and can mean the difference between success and failure of SSC mission objectives.

The availability requirement for the SSC has been specified at 80%; when allocated to reliability at the magnet level, this translates to a mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) greater than ever before achieved. Obviously, this presents a major challenge to the reliability engineer, who must ensure that appropriate measures are taken to design reliability into the magnet at all levels, starting from the beginning of the design phase. No amount of quality control inspection will provide the assurance necessary to achieve reliability figures of this order.

This paper presents a logical system approach to the design of superconducting magnets which, when adhered to, will result in magnets of adequate reliability to meet SSC availability requirements. The paper shows the steps to be taken to identify potential failure modes and the feedback process required to ensure that reliability, integrity, and availability are considered at all steps of the design process. The issues of magnet maintainability and the impact of maintainability on system availability are also discussed.

Operated by the Universities Research Association, Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-89ER40486.