Luca Ferrari

An α-drift tube linac (DTL) is a high-performance linac conceived for radioisotope production. The use of alpha particle beams may make yielding radionuclides hard to obtain with traditional nuclear reactors or by proton accelerators, by exploiting new reaction routes. This approach may lead to better radionuclide impurity profiles, simplifying the radiochemical separation and purification process. The key idea of the α-DTL is to use a high duty cycle linac composed of an electron cyclotron resonance ion source, a radio frequency quadrupole, and a DTL, able to accelerate an average current of 0.5 mA alpha beam from few MeV to 40 MeV, to cover the cross sections of many interesting reactions for radionuclides. The innovative feature of this linac is the capability of regulating energy at the exit of the DTL, by a particular use of the stabilization system (post couplers) of the DTL cavity.

A new methodology and an instrumental setup for the thermal conductivity estimation of isotropic bulk graphite and different carbides at high temperatures are presented. The method proposed in this work is based on the direct measurement of temperature and emissivity on the top surface of a sample disc of known dimensions. Temperatures measured under steady-state thermal equilibrium are then used to estimate the thermal conductivity of the sample by making use of the inverse parameter estimation technique. Thermal conductivity values obtained in this way are then compared to the material data sheets and values found in literature. The reported work has been developed within the Research and Development framework of the SPES (Selective Production of Exotic Species) project at INFN-LNL (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare – Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro).