Beam Pipes

ADC delivers high quality beam pipes, used for front and back end synchrotron equipment. The pipes are manufactured to exact customer specifications and requirements, and come with or without lead shielding.

Lead shielded transport pipes are used for locations such as hard X-ray insertion device beamlines at synchrotron facilities to transport white beam from one experimental hutch to another. These pipes are UHV-clean stainless steel pipes with conflat flanges on either end to complete the vacuum seal, but have a certain thickness of lead around the outside. Each assembly undergoes complete leak testing. In addition, a lead clam shell-type transition piece is installed over the conflat connections to prevent radiation from escaping in this location.

The lead shielded design ensures that every linear path from inside the pipe to outside pass through the design specification of lead thickness. ADC produces the lead either in sheet form and wrapped around the pipe or extruded as 1 piece and slid over the outside pipe diameter. When the lead is in sheet form, all the joints are staggered to prevent a line of sight to the inside of the tube and the overall minimum thickness of the lead in all areas are met.

A minimum 0.020 inch thick stainless steel sheet is tack welded over the entire outside diameter of the lead in order to prevent lead handling contamination.

Each stand consists of a rigid steel structure, with adjustable height. The stand allow for the manual adjustment of the shielded transport pipe in two directions, both vertical and horizontally transverse to beam axis, for alignment purposes. This can be performed by fine-threaded rod or screws and have a total adjustment range of +/- 0.5 inch (+/- 12 mm) about nominal beam centerline.

The base of the support stands have slotted through holes 0.625 inch in diameter transverse to the beam direction to mount the stand to the floor using ½ inch diameter screws. The final support stand assemblies are painted with a suitable primer and a finish coat of slate gray or equivalent.

ADC uses lead that meets ASTM specification B29-92, Standard Specification for Refined Lead. All lead are free from voids or fissures. All transport pipes are 304 stainless steel.

Shielded transport pipe with shielded stand assembly for Advanced Photon Source (APS)