PRELIMINARY DESIGN OF THE BEAM LOSS MONITORING SYSTEM FOR THE SNS.

The SNS to be built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory will provide a high average intensity 1 GeV beam to produce spallation neutrons. Loss of a even small percentage of this intense beam would result in high radiation. The Beam Loss Monitor (ELM) system must detect such small, long term losses yet be capable of measuring infrequent short high losses. The large dynamic range presents special problems for the system design. Ion chambers will be used as the detectors. A detector originally designed for the FNAL Tevatron, was considered but concerns about ion collection times and low collection efficiency at high loss rates favor a new design. The requirements and design concepts of the proposed approach will be presented. Discussion of the design and testing of the ion chambers and the analog j-Point end electronics will be presented. The overall system design will be described