International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Research Applications and Utilization of Accelerators

4-8 May 2009, Vienna

Electron Linacs for Cargo Inspection and Other Industrial Applications

C. Tang¹, H. Chen¹, Y. Liu², Q. Jin¹, T. Du¹, C. Cheng¹, D. Tong¹, and Y. Lin¹

¹Tainghua University, Beijing, China
²NUCTECH Company Limited, Beijing, China

Corresponding Author: tang.xuh@tsinghua.edu.cn

Cargo inspection is one of important part of homeland security. Most of the cargo inspection
systems adopt low energy linacs as their x-ray sources. And cargo inspection has becoming a more and more important application area of the electron linacs. Unlike the electron linacs for high energy physics and SR & FEL light sources, most of the low energy linacs adopt magnetrons as their RF power sources, because of their compact size, cheap price and their high efficiency. And s-band (2998 MHz or 2856 MHz) RF power sources are mostly used, although x-band structures are more compact and L-band linacs can deliver more electron beam power. For a low energy electron linac used for industrial application, once its performance meets the requirements, reliability and stability are the most important things.

Low energy electron linac development at Tsinghua University was begun from more than 30 years ago. The first one developed in Tsinghua Univerisy cooperating with several other universities and factories was BJ–10, which was a 10 MeV traveling wave linac for cancer therapy. From that time on, we developed different kinds of linacs for medical and industrial applications. Hundreds of standing wave electron accelerating tubes (with electron gun, target or titanium window and RF window) have been produced in the accelerator lab of Tsinghua University.

Together with NUCTECH company, kinds of cargo inspection systems have been developed and more than two hundred sets have been installed and used all over the world. These years, material identification and 100% inspection of the containers at the ports bring new challenges to the cargo inspection techniques and low energy linacs. We successfully developed several kinds of dual energy and fast beam on linacs for material identification and fast scan cargo inspection systems. Beside the above linacs for cargo inspection systems, linacs for high energy x-ray industrial CT and mail sterilization are also will be introduced in this paper.

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