Development of a new high temperature oven for the production of intense metal ion beams with ECR ion sources

High Temperature Ovens (HTOs) have widely been used to evaporate refractory materials in electron cyclotron resonance ion sources to produce hundreds of microamperes of multiply and highly charged metal ion beams. To meet the demands of milliamperes of multiply charged uranium and other heavy metal ion beams for future accelerators, a new and low-cost HTO is under development at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for better long-term stability at high evaporation rates. ANSYS simulations have been carried out to optimize the new HTO with low heating current to reduce the electromagnetic forces as an HTO is immersed in the strong ECRIS magnetic fields. A larger loading volume is employed to deal with higher material consumption. Off-line tests have shown that the unloaded new HTO operates stably up to 1800–1900 °C with low temperature gradients and good repeatability. This paper presents and discusses the conceptual design features of the new HTO and off-line tests.