🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov14.031550.3376@cs.rochester.edu>, dietz@cs.rochester.edu (Paul Dietz) writes...
>In article <Qf10GGi00WBOQ4orMH@andrew.cmu.edu> Kevin William Ryan <kr0u+@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
> 
>>    The best way to do the AC/DC conversion that I know of is paired
>>motor/generator sets, but these are considerably clunkier than
>>transformers. Higher voltages are de rigeur for long transmission, but
>>nasty for plugging in the toaster, so the conversion is important.
> 
>No, motor generators are mostly obsolete.  It's done with power
>electronics these days (banks of thyristors).

The Bevalac still uses several MG sets to provide the megawatts/kiloamps
necessary to run the accelerator and detector magnets.  They are huge monsters,
which take hours to warm up, make more noise than you can tolerate for
more than a few minutes without earplugs, and, alas, often have problems.
When one of them had a bad coil last year, it was offline for something
like 3 months while GE (I think) figured out how to rewind it.  In the 
meantime, the machine could not produce beams more than half the maximum
energy.  

Does anyone know how newer accelerators, like the Tevatron, generate 
DC for their magnets?

--------------------
Scott I. Chase			"It is not a simple life to be a single cell,
SICHASE@CSA2.LBL.GOV		 although I have no right to say so, having
				 been a single cell so long ago myself that I 
				 have no memory at all of that stage of my 
				 life." - Lewis Thomas