The Electrical Engineering research group and the RF Engineering of Accelerators group own or have access to highly specialised facilities at the School of Engineering and the Cockcroft Institute to develop cutting-edge research.
Equipment
Anechoic Chamber and Antenna Testing
Lancaster has two RF anechoic chambers. These specially designed boxes absorb all radio frequency signals that are emitted, avoiding reflections inside the chamber. This is required to measure the performance of antennas and other sensitive radio frequency electronics.
Cockcroft RF Bunker
A radiation test bunker able to test up to 50 MeV electrons, including 1 m thick concrete walls, a power door, and RF cabling to a control room outside the bunker. This included a PXIe system for control of experiments inside and water cooling up to 80 litres/min.
High Gradient Test Stand
We have an 8 MW S-band pulsed klystron for high gradient cavity testing, digital control system with dedicated instrumentation to test RF cavities to breakdown limits and to accurately measure breakdown rates and conditioning curves. An automated system is implemented for long term conditioning.
Millimetre waves and sub-THz Measurements
Our high-power microwave laboratory provides an array of well-established facilities that are fully operative for research in the field of low-frequency vacuum tubes and microwave components. A full set of equipment is available:
- Rhode & Schwarz ZVA40 Vector Network Analyzer (4 ports, 10MHz-40GHz)
- Two ZVA-Z110 Frequency converters (WR10 75GHz to 110GHz)
- Scalar network analysers
- Rhode & Schwarz 26 GHz spectrum analyser
- Power meter
- Frequency generator
Superconducting film test stand
We jointly own with STFC Daresbury Laboratory two cryocoolers and associated cryostats for testing of superconducting RF cavities and samples down to 4 K. This includes a 7.8 GHz superconducting choke resonator capable of sensitive measurements of RF surface resistance of flat superconducting disks. This also has a full suite of RF instruments including a fast oscilloscope capable of taking real-time RF measurements, a VNA and a low-phase noise signal generator.
TWT-Fab
The TWT-Fab is our distributed laboratory for the design, fabrication and testing of sub-THz travelling wave tubes. Please visit our dedicated web pages for more information:
- Sub-Thz Engineering Centre
- TWT-Fab
The Cockcroft Institute
The RF Engineering of Accelerators group is a part of the Cockcroft Institute, based at Daresbury Laboratory. The group has access to large-scale electron accelerator facilities owned and operated by the laboratory (CLARA), high power RF sources, X-ray sources, radiation shielded bunkers and cryogenic equipment.
The Cockcroft Institute