The concept of “smashing atoms on a target” has a long history since early 20th century. As physicists desire more nuclear reactions, the power of the particle beam has been increasing. A prime example of a state-of-art, high-power accelerator is the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) recently completed at Michigan State University (MSU). Open for users in 2022, FRIB is poised to become one of world’s most powerful heavy ion accelerators. As a result of the increased beam power, thermal and radiation damage managements of the beam-interacting components in the high-power accelerator facilities are becoming progressively challenging. On the other hand, the nuclear reactor industry has collected vast amount of expertise in the similar technical challenges. We believe more actively introducing the nuclear engineering expertise to the high-power accelerator field would greatly help advance the development of the high-power accelerators.

In this seminar, I will talk about a brief overview of FRIB and variety of its components and their technical challenges related to the thermal and radiation damage managements. These components include charge stripper, charge selector, production target, beam dump. One of the topics that I will spend time as an example of a success story of the application of the nuclear engineering expertise is the recent development of the liquid lithium stripper. Taking advantage of the nuclear-engineering-based liquid metal technology available at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), ANL and FRIB have developed the free-jet liquid lithium film. Various previous experiments demonstrated that a liquid lithium free jet is well compatible with an accelerator environment and could handle extreme thermal loading as expected.
Subsequently FRIB built the first free-jet liquid lithium stripper to form a fast-flowing (> 50 m/s), very thin (~10 m), liquid lithium free jet in the FRIB accelerator beam line. Finally the first demonstration of the free-jet liquid lithium stripper was successfully carried out, stably stripping variety of heavy ion beams at FRIB. To follow the success of the stripper development and lead FRIB to success, FRIB wants more nuclear engineers who can tackle thermal and radiation damage managements in the devices that are critical to achieve the ultimate goal of 400 kW uranium beam acceleration.

Bio: Takuji Kanemura studied nuclear engineering at Osaka University in Japan, and received his PhD in Engineering at Osaka University in 2010. The title of his PhD thesis was “Research on wave characteristics of liquid lithium free-surface flow”. He has been interested and involved in liquid metal applications in extreme environments, particularly windowless high power beam targets that involve thermal-hydraulics, fluid dynamic stability of jets, mass transportation in vacuum, and related technologies.
Until he joined the FRIB Laboratory in Michigan State University in 2016, He was involved in R&Ds of the liquid lithium target of IFMIF in Japan (IFMIF stands for the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility). Since he joined the FRIB Lab, he has been in charge of the liquid lithium charge stripper and various beam-intercepting devices in the FRIB accelerator. His recent involvement in beam-intercepting devices has broadened his interest into radiation damages in materials.

He also likes running, hiking, camping, reading, watching sports, etc. He finally started appreciating the beauty of classical music thanks to his ten-year-old son who plays the violin.