Study of the pulse power supply unit for the four-horn system of the CERN to Frejus neutrino super beam

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-efficiency pulse power supply design for the CERN neutrino super beam's four-horn system, featuring modular architecture and energy recovery to meet high current and power demands.

Contribution

It introduces a novel modular pulse power supply with 97% energy recovery efficiency tailored for high-current neutrino beam focusing horns.

Findings

Achieved 97% energy recovery efficiency.

Designed a modular system delivering 44 kA peak current.

Implemented a high-frequency capacitor charging and discharging scheme.

Abstract

The power supply studies for the four-horn system for the CERN to Fr\'ejus neutrino Super Beam oscillation experiment are discussed here. The power supply is being studied to meet the physics potential and the mega-watt (MW) power requirements of the proton driver of the Super Beam. A one-half sinusoid current waveform with a 350 kA maximum current and pulse length of 100 \mu s at 50 Hz frequency is generated and distributed to four-horns. In order to provide the necessary current needed to focus the charged mesons producing the neutrino beam, a bench of capacitors is charged at 50 Hz frequency to a +12 kV reference voltage and then discharged through a large switch to each horn via a set of strip-lines at the same rate. A current recovery stage allows to invert rapidly the negative voltage of the capacitor after the discharging stage in order to recuperate large part of the injected energy and thus to limit the power consuption. The energy recovery efficiency of that system is very high at 97%. For feasibility reasons, a modular architecture has been adopted with 8 modules connected in parallel to deliver 44 kA peak currents into the four-horn system.