Development of a commissioning plan for the APT linac

The Accelerator Production of Tritium (APT) facility utilizes a high-intensity CW linear accelerator consisting of both normal-conducting and superconducting (SC) RF structures to accelerate a 100-mA CW proton beam to an energy of between 1030 and 1700 MeV depending upon tritium production needs. The accelerator will be commissioned in stages defined by these different normal and superconducting modules. Different commissioning modes developed to set the transverse and longitudinal beam parameters, require pulsed operation of the accelerator over a wide range of beam currents. These stages and modes and the different techniques utilized to tune the phase and amplitude of the modules are described. Beam dynamics simulations of the tuning process for the phase and amplitudes of the RF structures in the low energy (LE) linac will be presented.