ALBA is working on the upgrade project that shall transform the actual storage ring, in operation since 2012, into a 4th generation light source, in which the soft X-rays part of the spectrum shall be diffraction limited. The project was launched in 2021 with an R&D budget to build prototypes of the more critical components. The storage ring upgrade is based on a MBA lattice which has to comply with several constraints imposed by the decision of maintaining the same circumference (269 m), the same number of cells (16), the same beam energy (3 GeV), and as many of the source points as possible unperturbed. At present, the lattice optimization, iterating with the technical constraints of space and performance, is ongoing. This paper presents the status of the project, with the present proposed lattice, the proposed design for magnets, vacuum chambers and girders, the proposed RF system with fundamental and harmonics cavities, and the general context of the upgrade.

The European LEAPS-INNOV project has launched a Research and Development program dedicated to the design of a new generation of germanium detectors for X-ray spectroscopy applications. The present article shows the results of the thermomechanical simulations of this design, based on finite element analysis (FEA) studies, under vacuum and cryogenic conditions. The first results of these simulations were published at IPAC'23*. In this new work, the final results are presented, which includes the thermal optimization of the detector with respect to the previous study, as well as new numerical simulations to investigate the effects of vibration transmission from the cryocooler to the head detector.

Within the field of Particle Accelerators engineering, the design of cooling channels for its components has heavily relied on experimental correlations to compute convective heat transfer coefficients. These coefficients are believed to have a conservative factor which end up in oversized designs. The following study assesses this conservative factor for fully developed flows, in the laminar, turbulent and transition regimes. It will also focus on different geometries to do so. With this objective in mind, simulation models have been developed and correlated with experiments carried out at ALBA synchrotron. In the course of this research, various turbulence models and meshes have been examined for the development of the simulations. Heat transfer coefficients were derived from the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations and juxtaposed with empirical correlations. The specific geometries under investigation encompass a circular channel with a 10mm inner diameter, a rectangular section channel, and a pinhole geometry, the latter being frequently employed in accelerator technology.