Evaluation of mean time between accidental interruptions for accelerator klystron systems based on the reliability engineering method

Frequent beam trips as experienced in existing high-power proton accelerators may cause thermal fatigue in Accelerator-Driven System components. In order to overcome the beam-trip problem, the beam-trip frequencies were estimated based on operational data on existing accelerators. However, there are at least three methods to calculate the mean time between accidental interruptions (MTBI) for one of the accelerator components, the klystron system. In this study, the four types of MTBI for the klystron systems of an electron/positron injector linear accelerator at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization were compared based on the same operational data. In the analysis, the stop events of the klystron systems were classified, and the MTBI for the klystron systems was calculated using the Kaplan–Meier (KM) estimation, which is a representative non-parametric reliability method. As a result, the mean value of the MTBI found by the KM estimation was 57.3 ± 6.5 hours. On the other hand, the mean values of the MTBI found by the three traditional methods were 30.9 ± 2.4, 32.0 ± 2.3, and 50.4 ± 5.9 hours. The mean values for the ratios of the MTBI found by the KM estimation, to the MTBI found by the traditional estimation, were 1.67 ± 0.07, 1.58 ± 0.06, and 1.14 ± 0.01, respectively. Although these results are obviously different from traditional results, it appears that the present estimation is suitable for the MTBI for accelerator components.