Development of an Acceptance Test Procedure for the XFEL SC Cavity Tuners

Cavity tuners are needed to precisely tune the resonant frequency of TESLA SC cavities for European XFEL linac. Although several units of the currently used device, originally designed at Saclay for TTF and then developed at DESY, have been manufactured and tested so far, a permanent installation like the XFEL poses higher requirements in terms of reliability and reproducibility. XFEL indeed requires about 1000 tuners to be produced in a relatively short time and then to simultaneously work in cryogenic environment, each of them being equipped with a stepper motor driving unit and two piezoelectric actuators. In this frame, an acceptance test procedure, here presented, has been studied, its main goal being the cross-check of issues affecting reliability: installation, mechanical coupling of active elements to cavity, motor and fast actuators functionality. An electronic equipment has been developed for driving signals, sensors and data management, specifically aiming toward an automatic and user-friendly routine in view of a large scale application. The procedure has been then applied for calibration purposes of a sample cavity assembly, the experimental results are also presented.