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GeV-class proton beam with an average power of several megawatts has many important applications in particle physics towards the intensity frontier, as well as in the advanced energy and material science. There are three different types of constructed accelerators for high power proton beam production: The cyclotron, linear accelerator and rapid-cycling synchrotron. The highest beam power of these accelerators currently is 1.4 MW. Studies have shown that the energy efficiency of the PSI cyclotron is about two times of the other types. Thus, the isochronous accelerator is a good technical route to develop proton machines with high beam power and high power efficiency. The isochronous fixed-field alternating gradient accelerators (FFAGs) scheme is a promising candidate for next-generation GeV-class high power proton driver. There are two bottle-neck problems in the development of GeV/mA class FFAG: As an isochronous accelerator, radial tune of isochronous FFAG is approximately increasing with beam energy in a linear way, and thus the integer resonance crossing problem becomes an inevitable problem. Single turn extraction with very low beam losses is also a verry important issue of high power isochronous FFAG. To the author’s knowledge, high beam extraction efficiency for beam energy of GeV-class is still unresolved. To solve those problems, an idea of integer resonance suppressor (IRS) which intentionally introduces the third harmonic magnetic field was proposed. One IRS is made up of two pair of coils, and each pair has independent power supply to generate the required harmonic magnetic bump. IRS can not only inhibit the radial oscillation and beam size blowup caused by integer resonance crossing but also contribute to a controllable coherent oscillation which is helpful to beam extraction with high efficiency. In the CYCIAE-FFAG design, νr=3 resonance is the lowest order resonance. Third harmonic field of only 1 Gs (1 Gs=10-4 T) can drive large coherent oscillation and then the following intrinsic resonance 3νr=10 will lead to serious beam size blowup effect. However, IRS can compensate the driving error and minimize the coherent oscillation before reaching the detrimental resonance. IRS provides a possibility of relaxing the requirement of magnet manufacture and installation. Our simulations show that third harmonic field of 10 Gs is acceptable with proper IRS settings. In the PSI 590 MeV ring cyclotron, beam is eccentrically injected to give rise to coherent oscillation. However, in CIAE-FFAG design, the beam was injected centrally and controllable amplitude of coherent oscillation was introduced in the integer resonance crossing process. The IRS scheme makes it possible to have knobs to adjust the amplitude and phase of coherent oscillation, which will be much easier to enlarge the turn separation. Taking the CYCIAE-FFAG project for example, simulations in this paper show that IRS can not only reduce the beam size growth rate to less than 5%, but also enlarge the turn separation to 3 cm. That is to say, IRS not only acts as resonance suppressor, but also plays the role of separation optimizer between the last and second last turn. The result shows that IRS is a potential solution for resonance crossing and extraction problems of GeV/mA class circular accelerator.

The compact high-intensity proton cyclotron based on the stripping-extraction method has made great progress and obtained huge applications since the first cyclotron was applicated in 1932 in the world, especially in the field of nuclear medicine. China Institute of Atomic Energy (CIAE) built a 30 MeV compact high-intensity proton cyclotron in the 1990s in China and a series of compact high-intensity proton cyclotrons with energy of 10 MeV, 14 MeV, 100 MeV, 14 MeV/1 mA used in boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) based on the stripping extraction technology have been developed. The 100 MeV compact high-intensity proton cyclotron (CYCIAE-100) built in 2014 is the largest compact high-intensity proton cyclotron with the higher energy in the world with a maximum current intensity of 520 μA and a beam power of 52 kW. The BNCT cyclotron is also the first high-intensity proton cyclotron with extracted beam reaching the mA level in China. A great progress on the stripping extraction technology used in cyclotrons has been achieved at CIAE during the 60 years development. The codes for stripping extraction studies, such as CYCTR, GOBLIN, STRIP-UBC and COMA, are developed by CIAE too. The study method with the code of GOBLIN for the beam dispersion effect in the stripping extraction cyclotrons was given in detail. The influence of the angle between the stripping foil and the beam to the quality of the extracted beam was analyzed in the paper. The single-turn stripping extraction technology for some special application was used in the stripping extraction cyclotrons. The stripping efficiency and the life of stripping foils were studied in the paper. The beam loss control in the stripping extraction field and stripping probe system were introduced in the end.

The multiphase cobalt–iron spinel was firstly synthesized via a facile cold plasma method and applied as a bifunctional electrocatalyst for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Compared with the single-phase obtained by the traditional calcination method, the CoFe2O4 and Co3O4 phase were obtained by the plasma method. The multivalence states of cobalt and iron facilitated electron transport in electrochemical reactions. The plasma sample had a small particle size (5 nm) due to the low operation temperature. Notably, electron impact produced more oxygen vacancies and a larger surface area on CoxFeyO4, which increased the active sites and electronic conductivity. Electrochemical investigations indicated that the multiphase spinel obtained with a quasi-four-electron transfer process showed an onset potential of 0.76 V versus the RHE for the oxygen reduction reaction. In the oxygen evolution reaction, the potential of current density at 10 mA cm−2 was 1.53 V versus RHE. As for the overall electrocatalytic activity, the multiphase spinel had a ΔE (the difference between E10(OER) and E1/2(ORR)) of 0.89 V, exhibiting greater bifunctional activity than the other prepared catalysts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FeOx electrocatalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction were prepared via one-step synthesis using electron impact with cold plasma as the electron source. Given the low operation temperature, FeOx by plasma technology showed a smaller particle size than that prepared via conventional calcination. Notably, electron impact produced more oxygen vacancies and a larger surface area on FeOx, which increased active sites and electronic conductivity, than plasma. Electrochemical investigations indicated that FeOx prepared by plasma exhibited remarkable oxygen reduction reaction activity toward the four-electron electrochemical reduction of oxygen. The results demonstrated that this facile fabrication method is a promising route for developing cost-effective and high-performance catalysts to be used in electrochemical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A machine learning-based approach is proposed to predict the transient stability of power systems after a large disturbance. The post-disturbance trajectories of generator rotor angles are taken as a whole cluster, and 19 cluster features are defined to depict the overall transient stability characteristics of the power systems. A hybrid approach, which combines the linear support vector machine with the decision tree, is proposed to generate the final transient stability classifier. Comprehensive studies are conducted on the IEEE 39-bus and IEEE 145-bus test systems to verify the performance of the proposed approach. Test results show that by using the cluster features and the proposed approach, the transient stability of the power system can be predicted accurately with a shorter training time. Furthermore, the prediction classifier is robust to unknown load levels and network topologies, especially under situations when some generator measurements are unavailable and the number of input cluster features is independent of the system scale, making the proposed approach more suitable to transient stability prediction of large-scale power systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]