ARTICLE IN PRESS

Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 513 (2003) 429–438

Improvement of high-voltage performance of acceleration

tubes by cleaning the walls with a high-pressure water jet
S. Takeuchi*, T. Nakanoya, H. Kabumoto, T. Yoshida
Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, Tokai Research Establishment, 2-4 Shirakata-shirane, Tokai, Naka, Ibaraki 319-1195, Japan

Received 25 January 2003; received in revised form 17 June 2003; accepted 26 June 2003

Abstract

We cleaned electrostatic accelerator tubes by applying a high-pressure water jet and examined their high-voltage
performances at 1 and 3 MV. The cleaning was very effective in reducing discharge activities at their rated voltages. We
did some experimental investigations with the tubes and their ceramic insulators. We found that removal of
microparticles loosely bound on the vacuum-side ceramic surfaces had an important effect in eliminating the discharge
activities.
r 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

PACS: 52.75.Di; 52.80.Vp; 81.05.Mh; 81.65.Cf

Keywords: Electrostatic acceleration tubes; High-voltage performance; High-pressure water-jet rinsing; Loosely bound particles;
Ceramic insulator surfaces

1. Introduction shown in Fig. 1(b), to improve the high-voltage

At JAERI-Tokai, a folded-type tandem accel-
erator 20UR Pelletron (National Electrostatic
Corporation) in which 20 1 MV column modules
are vertically stacked has been running well since
1982 [1]. The operational highest terminal voltage
was 18 MV in the beginning and in the vicinity of
16 MV in recent years. The 1 MV tube modules are
composed of three sections of a 173 mm long tube
with 11 13 mm acceleration gaps and a 30 mm
thick heatable aperture assembly, as shown in
Fig. 1(a). We decided to replace the acceleration
tubes with 300 mm long compressed geometry tubes
*Corresponding author.
E-mail address: takeuchi@tandem.tokai.jaeri.go.jp
(S. Takeuchi).
0168-9002/$ - see front matter r 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S0168-9002(03)02080-1
performance toward 20 MV. The new 1 MV tube
modules will consist of two 300 mm long tubes
with 21 13 mm acceleration gaps [2]. Replacing
heatable aperture assemblies with additional accel-
eration gaps has been proved to be effective to
improve the high-voltage performance by Ass-
mann et al. [3] and at the ORNL 25URC tandem
accelerator [4,5].
It is required for the tube replacement program
to resume stable operation for experiments as soon
as possible. However, high-voltage tube condition-
ing is generally very time consuming for a large
accelerator system. Our idea to solve this problem
is to carry out cleaning of the tubes before
installation. High Pressure Water Jet Rinsing
(HWJR) has become a popular cleaning
method for superconducting accelerating cavities.
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430 S. Takeuchi et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 513 (2003) 429–438

Fig. 1. High gradient acceleration tubes; (a) three short-tubes (old standard tubes) in a 1 MV module in the present 20UR tandem
accelerator at JAERI-Tokai and (b) two long tubes (so called compressed geometry tubes) for the replacement.

Removing pollution from the cavity surfaces is
important to eliminate the electron field emission
that causes degradation in cavity quality factors at
high fields [6–10]. With respect to the electrostatic
acceleration tubes composed of titanium electro-
des and alumina ceramic insulators, the high-
voltage insulation performance is predominated by
vacuum side ceramic surfaces. Pollution, dirt or
loosely bound ceramic grains could be a source of
discharge activities and need to be removed from
the surfaces and tube interior. We, therefore,
planned to adopt the HWJR to the new 21 gap
long tubes to remove such sources of discharge
activities, expecting a substantial reduction of
lengthy high-voltage tube conditioning time and
an improvement of the high-voltage performance.
We carried out the following experiments. We
examined the cleaning effect of the HWJR on
accelerator tube inside walls. As a feasibility study,
we did a 1 MV high-voltage test with 11 gap short
tubes by putting them in a 1 MV module of the
tandem accelerator. For 21 gap long tubes
obtained for the tube replacement, we carried out
a 3 MV high-voltage test at NEC.
Our method of tube cleaning is described in
Section 2, investigations about ceramic surfaces in
Section 3, the result of the 1 MV test of short tubes
in Section 4 and the result of the 3 MV test of long
tubes in Section 5. The alumina ceramics used in
the short and long tubes had different origins. The
physical properties we experimentally obtained
from the ceramics are compared in Section 6.
2. Cleaning methods
High-pressure air jets were used to make water
jets as is illustrated in Fig. 2. From the top of the
spraying rod, two jet streams of mist came out
toward the ceramic walls and electrodes. The
nozzle holes were 2 mm in diameter. The spread
of the jets were about 10 mm in diameter at the
acceleration tube wall. The air was supplied from
commercially available bottles of air with a
capacity of 470 MPa l and passed through 40 C
heaters and a 0.3 mm filter. The air was fed at a
pressure of about 1 MPa and at a flow rate of
about 0.6 MPa l/s. Estimated jet speed was
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S. Takeuchi et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 513 (2003) 429–438
Fig. 2. Method of cleaning acceleration tubes with high-
pressure water jets.
250–300 m/s. De-ionized water of 15–18 MO cm
was supplied from a water purifier. The water flow
rate was 0.2–0.4 l/min. In order to rinse the inside
thoroughly, the nozzles were tilted by 715 , the
spraying rod was moved up and down at a speed
of 15 cm/min, and the tube was rotated on a
turntable at a speed of 10 rev/min. The jet spray
machine and a tube drying heater were put in a
clean booth in order to prevent dust from
accumulating on the wet surfaces after the rinse.
Six 11 gap short tubes were rinsed for about
12 min spending one bottle of air. After the
HWJR, the tubes were dried at 50 C for a few
hours in the clean booth and baked at about
200 C for 2 weeks with pumping by a turbo-
molecular pump. The tubes were unused ones in
storage for about 15 years.
Six 21 gap long tubes were cleaned more
thoroughly, i.e. their inside walls were washed in
a 600 W ultrasonic wave bath for 30 min with
water and some neutral detergent and rinsed with
HWJR for about 25 min spending two bottles of
431
air. Then the tubes were dried and baked similarly
as the previous short tubes.
We paid special attention to the jet power. In the
tubes, 0.5 mm thick inner electrodes are attached
with small joints. Therefore, the jet power should
be low enough so as not to damage the thin
electrodes.
3. Some investigations on high-pressure water jet
rinsing and ultrasonic cleaning
We investigated the cleaning effect of the HWJR
by spraying an air jet in an acceleration tube and
counting particles in the air from the tube. The
measurement was done with the jet spray machine
(Fig. 2) without feeding water. The flow rate of
sprayed air was measured by an air flow meter. A
particle counter took in a part of the sprayed air at
a flow rate of 0.5 l/min. The spraying rod and
acceleration tube were moved just as in the case of
HWJR. The measurement was done with increas-
ing the air pressure in steps of 0.5 MPa. At each
pressure increment, the counting rate exponen-
tially decreased after several minutes and became
small enough to stop counting in 10 min. More
particles came out with increasing air pressure
because of blasting power of the air jet itself. Two
short tubes, which had been unused and aged
about 15 years, were used for the measurements.
One of them was examined without any treatment
and the other after applying HWJR. The results
are shown in Fig. 3 as a function of air pressure.
Much fewer particles came out from the tube
rinsed with HWJR than the untreated tube. This
indicates that the original wall surfaces were full of
loosely bound particles and were effectively
cleaned by the HWJR.
In addition, surfaces of ceramic samples were
observed through microscopes. By taking pictures
of a site before and after the HWJR by a laser
microscope, it was confirmed that many tiny
particles and dirt were removed, as is seen from
Fig. 4. However, ceramic grain removals were not
found in the observation. The ceramic insulators
for the samples used in the experiments were
obtained from NEC, which were the same as the
ceramics used for our short tubes.
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Fig. 3. Count of particles in the air from acceleration tubes
during air jet spraying. The tubes were short tubes in different
surface conditions; one as it was, one rinsed with a high-
pressure water jet and one washed with ultrasonic wave.
Particles (>0.3 mm) were measured by using a particle counter
and a gas flow rate meter and with increasing air pressure in
discrete stages.
Ultrasonic wave cleaning was also effective.
Counts of particles in the sprayed air from
short tube walls cleaned by ultrasonic wave are
plotted in Fig. 3. We examined the water used for
ultrasonic wave cleaning of the long-tube walls by
filtering it through a sheet of filter paper.
From the observation through a microscope,
the numbers were estimated on the order of
1.5  106 particle/tube for the particles of 1 to
10 mm, 1  105 particle/tube for 10–100 mm and
1  103 particle/tube for 100 mm or greater. Rela-
tively large particles mostly seemed to be metallic
fragments from titanium electrodes. From the
observation through a laser microscope, the clean-
ing result was similar to the one seen in Fig. 4.
4. Result of the high-voltage test of short tubes for
1 MV
The six short tubes cleaned with HWJR as
described in Section 2 were set in a 1 MV column
Fig. 4. Laser microscope images of a ceramic surface (a) before
and (b) after a high-pressure water jet rinse. Tiny points and
dark spots in white circles vanished after the rinse.
module (4th module from the bottom) of the
tandem accelerator in place of three existing low-
energy tubes and three high-energy tubes. This
configuration corresponds to testing two sets of
1 MV tube modules in parallel. For potential
grading, metal oxide on ceramic resisters rated at
1.2 GO were put on each acceleration gap. The test
was done during the conditioning for all the tubes
just after the replacement. The high tension was
supplied only to this 1 MV module by short
circuiting all the others. Fig. 5 shows the records
of the voltage, low-energy side tube vacuum
pressure and X-ray monitor at the pressure vessel
wall. The voltage was smoothly increased up to
1.07 MV, although several sparks occurred. The
generating voltmeter and capacitor pickoff signal
were quiet, indicating that continuous or frequent
discharge activities were not occurring in the tubes.
In the records of the vacuum pressures, there were
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S. Takeuchi et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 513 (2003) 429–438 433

Fig. 5. Strip chart recorded during the first high-voltage tensioning for the six short tubes installed in the both low- and high-energy
sides at the 4th 1 MV module of the tandem accelerator. For space considerations, only the low-energy tube vacuum record is shown.

no continuous or frequent outgas spikes due to the
discharges in the tubes and the vacuum recovery
was quick after the sparks. There were small
increases in the X-ray radiation with a few of the
discharges which diminished quickly. The condi-
tioning time for the cleaned tubes was much
shorter than that for the original tubes.
For comparison with tubes not cleaned by
HWJR, presented in Fig. 6 is a typical old record
of voltages during a conditioning done for a series
of single 1 MV modules in 1980. Small and full
sparks had happened much more frequently. It is
also seen from the records of the X-ray, tube
vacuum and capacitor pickoff signal that there were
more discharge activities than the sparks seen in the
record of voltage. Much more conditioning was
required for them to run stably at the rated voltage.
5. Result of the high-voltage test of long tubes for
3 MV
The six long tubes cleaned at JAERI as
described in Section 2 were examined in a 3 MV
testing machine at NEC. For potential grading,
metal oxide on ceramic resisters rated at 1.1 GO
were used both on the tube and column structures.
The vessel was filled with SF6 gas at a pressure of
0.57 MPa. The tube vacuum pressure was the mid
10 6 Pa range. An X-ray monitor was placed at
1 m from the pressure vessel wall. The high-voltage
tensioning was done three times over a period of 3
days. The strip chart records of the terminal
voltage and tube vacuum pressure are shown in
Fig. 7.
In the first day, the voltage was brought up
carefully and smoothly increased to the rated
voltage of 3.0 MV in 4 h. There were a few mild
discharges. The associated vacuum outgas recov-
ered quickly. The column structure seemed to be
conditioning as much as the acceleration tubes.
The second and third days were eventless, as there
were only a few mild sparks. The voltage was held
stable and calm with a natural small increase from
3.0 to 3.1 MV during 9 h and from 3.1 to 3.2 MV
during 9 h, respectively. The very small voltage
fluctuations became even smaller after a minor
discharge on the third day. With respect to the
X-ray radiation, there was only one momentary
increase at 2.1 MV in the first day, which was a
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434 S. Takeuchi et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 513 (2003) 429–438

Fig. 6. Strip chart recorded during a high-voltage conditioning done in 1980 for the 5th 1 MV module of the tandem accelerator. For
space considerations, only the low-energy tube vacuum record is shown.

mild one, well below 10 mSv/h. The X-ray level was
normally in the ambient level of 0.02–0.05 mSv/h.
The test accelerator lost charge current was within
the range of 0.4–2.1 mA, which was given by the
difference between the charging current and drain
current.
For comparison, given in Fig. 8 is a chart record
of the high-voltage test done at NEC for six long-
tubes before delivering to JAERI. These long-
tubes belonged to the same ceramic batch as the
tubes used for the test described above. There were
continuous discharge activities and frequent full
sparks even in the vicinity of 2.9 MV. The lost
charge current ranged from 5 to 10 mA.
It is noted that the cleaning had a very big effect
on improving the high-voltage performance, i.e.,
an ideally stable condition was obtained at the
rated voltage with very little high-voltage con-
ditioning as a result of applying the HWJR to the
tubes similar to those that suffered from stubborn
discharge activities.
6. Investigations of differences between the two
ceramics
Although the alumina ceramics in our new long
tubes come from the same supplier as the older
short tubes, they may have been made from a
different material source and caused a limitation in
the high-voltage performance as is seen from Fig.
8, according to NEC. We investigated the old and
new ceramics, using ceramic samples and old short
and new long tubes.
From an observation of the surfaces through a
microscope, the old ceramics contained many
grains as large as 40 mm in diameter while the
new ceramics have small grains, as is seen from the
SEM images in Fig. 9. The mean grain sizes from
the observation were 25 and 14 mm, respectively.
From an experiment of air jet spraying and
particle counting done as described in Section 3,
the curves in Fig. 10 indicate that the new ceramics
in the long tubes had more particles coming off
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S. Takeuchi et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 513 (2003) 429–438 435

Fig. 7. Strip charts recorded during the first high-voltage tensioning for the six long-tubes cleaned with high-pressure water jet rinsing.
From the top, the charts are of the first, second and third days.

easily at a low pressure, 0.5 MPa, than the old
ceramics in the short tubes. Such loosely bound
microscopic particles on the surfaces are probably
a source of discharge activities.
From an experiment of outgas from a sample
heated by a 850 C boat, it was found that the new
ceramics contained much more gas and had a
much smaller diffusion coefficient than the old
ceramics. The outgas curves are shown in Fig. 11.
The gas contents estimated from the curves were
roughly 0.6 mol% for the old ceramics and
4 mol% for the new ceramics. The diffusion
coefficients estimated by diffusion equation were
of the order of 4  10 4 and 7  10 6 cm2/s,
respectively. These differences seem to be due to
their grain sizes.
In summary, we found that the new ceramics
were composed of smaller grains and had a lot of
microscopic grains loosely bound on the surfaces
compared to the old ceramics. These surface
conditions limit the high-voltage performance of
the long tubes without wall cleaning.
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436 S. Takeuchi et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 513 (2003) 429–438

Fig. 8. Strip chart recorded of voltage during the high-voltage tensioning test done for the six long tubes not cleaned with high-
pressure water jet rinsing.

Fig. 10. Count of particles in the air from original short and
long tubes during air jet spraying. Particles (>0.3 mm) were
measured by using a particle counter and a gas flow rate meter
and with increasing air pressure in discrete stages.

7. Discussion

Large tandem accelerators built many years ago

Fig. 9. Scanning electron microscope images of two different
ceramic samples: (a) of the old ceramics and (b) of the new
ceramics.
at JAERI, ORNL and other institutions did not
attain their design voltages expected from a linear
function of the number of acceleration tube
sections. ORNL applied a compressed geometry
acceleration tube to the 25URC tandem accel-
erator to exceed its design value [5]. The
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S. Takeuchi et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 513 (2003) 429–438
Fig. 11. Outgas curves from two different ceramic samples of
the old and new ceramics heated on an 850 C boat in a vacuum
chamber pumped by a 500 l/s pump. Zigzag structures were due
to periodic short removals of the sample from the boat for
background measurements of the vacuum.
compressed geometry, which reduced electric field
gradients along the ceramic surfaces, was useful to
hinder discharge activities, although it did not
solve the problem that the high voltages were not
proportional to the number of tube sections. The
nonlinear effect must be essentially attributed to
the condition that 1 MV tube modules still had
significant discharge activities at the rated voltage
of 1 MV, as is seen from Fig. 6. In such a condition
for the tube modules linked by high impedance
voltage dividers, a chain of discharges is easily
triggered by a surge originated in a tube module
and a full breakdown occurs below the design
voltage. In an ideal condition that discharge
activities are much less in the tube modules, a
chain of discharges is not likely to happen. This
condition was realized with the cleaned long tubes
during the 3 MV high-voltage test. It arouses the
interest whether such a stable condition will be
presented at 20 MV in the upcoming high-voltage
test of the JAERI 20UR column with cleaned long
tubes.
The clear reduction of discharge activities was a
result of removing loosely bound particles on tube
ceramic. In other words, loose microparticles
dominated the discharge activities. The lost charge
current through the long tubes was significantly
decreased by HWJR. These facts suggest that
437
loose microparticles contributed to carrying elec-
trons on the vacuum side surfaces and to emitting
electrons from triple junctions where ceramic
walls, electrodes and vacuum meet. We believe
that secondary electrons are easily emitted from
loose microparticles because they can be saturated
and heated with fewer electrons. Moreover, very
loose microparticles can be highly charged, pulled
out easily, and accelerated by the electric field.
When they collide with surfaces in the vacuum,
electrons, gas and additional microparticles are
emitted. This chain process may develop to a
heavier discharge activity.
There was a clear difference in ceramic grain
sizes between the two ceramics. But, the present
work gives no conclusions for their contributions
to high-voltage stabilities. Both the cleaned short
and long tubes have cleared their rated voltages of
1 and 3 MV, respectively, with a very high
stability. It would be interesting to know the
highest voltage one can go with the clean tubes. A
test at a voltage much higher than the rated
voltages was, regrettably, not allowed by the
present column conditions.
8. Conclusions
A HWJR with highly de-ionized water followed
by de-gas processing was applied to the cleaning of
acceleration tube vacuum side wall surfaces. As a
result of experimental investigations, it was found
that there were millions of microparticles loosely
bound on the ceramic surfaces which were easily
removed by the cleaning. The result of the high-
voltage test with 11 gap short tubes in a 1 MV
module in the tandem accelerator proved that the
HWJR is very useful to reduce the discharge
activities at the rated voltage. The result of the
high-voltage test with 21 gap long tubes for 3 MV
modules confirmed that the HWJR is also effective
to a larger scale system composed of the long
tubes, although their new ceramics consisted of
small grains and originally held more microparti-
cles on the wall surfaces compared to the old
ceramics for the short tubes. The HWJR cleaning
is, then, a promising method to drastically reduce
lengthy tube conditioning and to improve the
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high-voltage performance of a large acceleration
tube system.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Dr. J.A. Ferry and
Dr. G.A. Norton for kindly giving us ceramic
samples for investigations and for carrying out the
high-voltage test for us according to our request.
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