Hardware availability calculations and results of the IFMIF accelerator facility

Abstract

Hardware availability calculations have been done individually for each system of the deuteron accelerators of the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility (IFMIF). The principal goal of these analyses is to estimate the availability of the systems, compare it with the challenging IFMIF requirements and find new paths to improve availability performances.; Major unavailability contributors are highlighted and possible design changes are proposed in order to achieve the hardware availability requirements established for each system. In this paper, such possible improvements are implemented in fault tree models and the availability results are evaluated.; The parallel activity on the design and construction of the linear IFMIF prototype accelerator (LIPAc) provides detailed design information for the RAMI (reliability, availability, maintainability and inspectability) analyses and allows finding out the improvements that the final accelerator could have. Because of the R&D behavior of the LIPAc, RAMI improvements could be the major differences between the prototype and the IFMIF accelerator design.