Reliability and Availability Studies in the RIA Driver Linac

The Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA) facility will include various complex systems and must provide radioactive beams to many users simultaneously. The availability of radioactive beams for most experiments at the fully-commissioned facility should be as high as possible within design cost limitations. To make a realistic estimate of the achievable reliability a detailed analysis is required. The RIA driver linac is a complex machine containing a large number of superconducting (SC) resonators and capable of accelerating multiple-charge-state beams [1]. At the pre-CDR stage of the design it is essential to identify critical facility subsystem failures that can prevent the driver linac from operating. The reliability and availability of the driver linac were studied using expert information and data from operating machines such as ATLAS, APS, JLab, and LANL. Availability studies are performed with a Monte-Carlo simulation code previously applied to availability assessments of the NLC facility [2] and the results used to identify subsystem failures that most affect the availability and reliability of the RIA driver, and guide design iterations and component specifications to address identified problems.