STATUS OF THE CARBON ION SOURCE COMMISSIONING AT MEDAUSTRON S. Myalski 1 , N. Gambino 1 , L. Adler 1 , F. Ecker 1 , A. De Franco 1 , F. Farinon 1 , G. Guidoboni 1 , C.Kurfürst 1 , L. Penescu 2 , M. Pivi 1 , C. Schmitzer 1 , I. Strasik 1 , A. Wastl 1 1 EBG MedAustron, Wr. Neustadt, Austria, 2 Abstract Landscapes, Montpellier, France Abstract MedAustron is the synchrotron-based Ion therapy center of Austria. Accelerated proton beams with energies of 62-252 MeV are used to treat patients with cancer since 2016. Car- bon ion beam is currently under commissioning and will provide treatment in 2019 with energies of 120-400MeV/u [1]. The Injector features three identical ECRIS from Pan- technik, two of which are used to generate the proton and the carbon beam with an energy of 8 keV/u. The generated beam is sent to a 400keV/u RFQ and a 7MeV/u H-mode Linac. Then follows the injection in a 77 m synchrotron via a middle energy transfer line, where the energies for patient treatment are reached. The beam is sent to four irradiation rooms via a high energy transfer line, two of which are cur- rently used for medical treatment. The medical environ- ment of the accelerator puts strict requirements on the source performances in terms of long term stability and up- time. The extracted carbon intensity needs to be on the or- der of 150 μA with maximum current fluctuations of ±2.5% on the continuous run. In this work we discuss the status of carbon commissioning with particular emphasis on the experimental results obtained during the ion source tuning [2]. INTRODUCTION MedAustron Ion Therapy Center (Fig.1) is a medical fa- cility. This creates an environment significantly different than in research facilities [3]. One source of limitation are law restrictions when using technical devices for patient treatment and procedures that the facility needs to fulfill to be certified for clinical operation. Furthermore sensitive data are processed, therefore certain standards are imple- mented, which affect not only the clinical part, but the com- pany as a whole. This includes access control, available software, workflow and documentation. The other aspect is related to patients themselves. Each delay or failure di- rectly affects people who wait for their therapy, relying on the help provided to them in a difficult situation created by a medical condition, cancer. Therefore, we continuously work to improve uptime, stability and limit even remote failure risks. This puts significant overhead on all our ac- tivities, but also motivates us to look for new ways to im- prove reliability of the system we use. Although such work is not directly comparable to scien- tific investigations, it may provide another point of view on requirements and expectations to the systems used in non-scientific conditions. Out of three sources we use one exclusively in the medical environment and the second one (carbon source) is just being prepared to include into the medical accelerator by optimizing source performance to required level. The goal of this paper is to present con- straints, challenges, the work invested to improve the sys- tem and unique opportunities which medical environment provide us. Figure 1. MedAustron Ion Therapy Center MEDICAL ENVIRONMENT REQUIRE- MENTS Without external limitations the most effective approach to keep beam properties stable would be occasional re-tun- ing of the source parameters. In our case such approach is not effective because parameters are fixed and cannot be modified without and official release process approved by the QA department. To allow the device to be used for patient treatment it needs to go through a certification process, which takes into account potential risks for patient, service personnel, other devices as well as natural environment. This process, implemented mostly on large-scale reproducible products, affects how we are able to work with device on the level of complication of Synchrotron. MedAustron Particle Ther- apy Accelerator (MAPTA) consists of hundreds of devices (ion sources, various magnets, linear accelerator and beam diagnostic devices). Starting from sub-components, through components and functional units it is needed to un- dergo through multi-step commissioning to make it possi- ble to certify the whole device as a medical machine. This process is required also for parameters, set points and set- tings. Only when both the machine setup and parameters are ‘fixed’, the medical verification can commence. During this process various ‘failure scenarios’, tests and measure- ments are done. In the end the clinically released set of pa- rameters is allowed to be used for treatment. This changes the approach to beam stability in the ion source, as even the small change in parameters does in- clude time consuming process of releasing new medical _____________________ † szymon.myalski@ifj.edu.pl 23th Int. Workshop on ECR Ion Sources ECRIS2018, Catania, Italy JACoW Publishing ISBN: 978-3-95450-196-0 doi:10.18429/JACoW-ECRIS2018-TUP01 Applications TUP01 71 Content from this work may be used under the terms of the CC BY 3.0 licence (© 2018). Any distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s), title of the work, publisher, and DOI.