3380 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRON DEVICES, VOL. 69, NO.
6, JUNE 2022
Thermal Design of Megawatt Power-Level
X-Band Coaxial Magnetron
Sandeep Kumar Vyas
Abstract — Thermal analysis of X-band high-power
(∼2 MW) coaxial magnetron is presented. The X-band
magnetron is used for a medical linear accelerator
(LINAC). The performance of LINAC depends on the RF
performance of the magnetron. This magnetron consists
of an oxygen-free copper anode with 40 vanes coupled
with the coaxial cavity, cooling channels, and an indirectly
heated oxide-coated cathode. The operating temperature
of the cathode is about 850 ◦ C, while the tungsten heater
temperature is greater than 1800 ◦ C. Therefore, the thermal
design of X-band magnetron is a challenging task and it
is essential for reliable operation. This article deals with
the step-by-step thermal design procedure for each part of
this magnetron. The analytical (MATLAB code) calculation
of heater temperature for various heater voltages is also
carried out for verification of simulation results. By analyz-
ing the temperature uniformity on the emitting surface of
the cathode and the effect of the heat film coefficient, it was
found that the maximum temperatures on the magnetron
anode block, cathode surface, and heater are 220 ◦ C,
1045 ◦ C, and 1842 ◦ C, respectively, for an applied 5-L/min
flow rate of water cooling.
Index Terms — Cathode support, coaxial magnetron,
helical heater, oxide-coated cathode, thermal analysis.
I. I NTRODUCTION
T HE magnetron oscillator is a high-efficiency cross-field
vacuum electron device. Here, the beam–wave interaction
takes place in the azimuthal direction with an applied axial
continuous magnetic field that makes the device very compact
and energy-efficient. Since its invention during World War II,
magnetrons had been used and are still being used in varieties
of industrial, scientific, and medical applications [1], [2].
A linear accelerator (LINAC) system requires high-power
(megawatts) microwave source for the RF field to beam energy
transfer. The magnetron is the most economical and suitable
for this.
The nowadays trend is to develop a lightweight, compact,
and easily transportable X-band LINAC system [3]. The
megawatt power-level X-band magnetron is required as an
Manuscript received January 8, 2022; revised March 20, 2022;
accepted March 30, 2022. Date of publication April 13, 2022; date of
current version May 24, 2022. The review of this article was arranged by
Editor L. Kumar.
The author is with the Department of Physics, Shree Chavo Veero Girls
PG College, Bagar, Rajasthan 333023, India (e-mail: sandeepvyas19@
gmail.com).
Color versions of one or more figures in this article are available at
https://doi.org/10.1109/TED.2022.3164643.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TED.2022.3164643
0018-9383 © 2022 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
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RF source for the development of X-band LINAC [3]. There
are some recent works that have been reported on the elec-
tromagnetic and particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of X-band
magnetron [4]–[6]. The oscillation efficiency of high-power
magnetron generally lies between 50% and 60%, thereby
dissipating the remaining kilowatts of power in the form
of heat inside the magnetron. The pulse power magnetron
generally has an oxide-coated indirect heated cathode, which
operates at a temperature above 850 ◦ C [7], [8]. The anode
also gets the heat radiation from the cathode surface. Thus,
overall, a very large amount of power is dissipated inside the
magnetron. Therefore, efficient thermal design is required for
the safe operation of magnetron.
In the previous work for industrial 60-kW L-band mag-
netron [9], they estimated the heat convection coefficient of
forced-air cooling to be 500 W/(m2 ·K). The L-band magnetron
had the directly heated tungsten cathode and the thermal analy-
sis was done with the simplified model: nonhelical cathode
shape and power were delivered by heat flux. Their aim was to
confirm the experimental results and find the heat convection
coefficient in order to apply the efficient cooling rate. The good
agreement between simulation and experiments was observed.
However, it is well known that the dimension of all most
microwave devices decreases with frequency increase causing
more difficulty for thermal heat management. For example,
in 3.1-MW S-band magnetron, the cathode length is around
40 mm, but here, in X-band, it is around 10 mm [10].
This article deals with the thermal study of ∼2-MW pulsed
power, frequency-tunable X-band coaxial magnetron using the
3-D code ANSYS [11]. The complete geometry and the 3-D
sectional view of the cathode–anode assembly of simulated
coaxial magnetron with the cooling channels are shown in
Fig. 1. The different parts (and corresponding materials) of
the magnetron are the anode [oxygen-free high conductiv-
ity copper (OFHC Cu)], coaxial cavity (OFHC Cu), heater
(97% tungsten and 3% rhenium alloy) with the radius of rh ,
cathode (nickel) with the radius of rc , ceramics (Al2 O3 ), the
pole piece (iron), and cathode supports (Kovar). An iron pole
piece and yoke are used to confine the magnetic field in the
interaction region between the anode and the cathode. There
are three main heat sources that exist for heat generation in
the magnetron namely cathode temperature, electron beam
collision with the anode, and the RF loss due to the finite con-
ductivity of cavity material. There is some other heat source
that also exists such as slot mode and TE121 cavity mode.
VYAS: THERMAL DESIGN OF MEGAWATT POWER-LEVEL X-BAND COAXIAL MAGNETRON
Fig. 1. Schematic of the complete (top) and 3-D sectional (bottom) view
of the cathode–anode assembly of coaxial magnetron.
If magnetron is not designed properly, then the slot and TE121
mode create a lot of thermal problems. An indirectly heated
oxide-coated cathode is used to obtain the desired current,
which in the present design is ≈90 A at 37 kV. The cathode
is heated at the temperature above 850 ◦ C using a heater
(filament). The heater is made using a tungsten–rhenium (3%)
wire.
This article is organized into four sections, including the
introduction. Section II presents a coupled electric-thermal
nonlinear simulation of heater and cathode. The analytical
calculation of heater temperature has been done by solving the
heat equation using MATLAB too. The MATLAB code for the
solution of the heat equation has been given in the appendix for
the reader’s help. Section III contains the thermal simulation
of complete magnetron, the calculation of power loss, and heat
transfer coefficient.
II. T HERMAL S IMULATION OF H EATER AND C ATHODE
A. Thermal Simulation of Heater
A helical-type heater made of 97% tungsten and 3% rhe-
nium alloy is used in this magnetron to warm up the cathode
surface at a temperature above 850 ◦ C. The electron emission
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3381
Fig. 2. 3-D simulation model of heater.
from the cathode is dependent on the heater temperature
remotely. Generally, the heater temperature is calibrated in
terms of applied heater voltage. Fig. 2 shows the 3-D ANSYS
workbench simulation model of meshed heater only. The ther-
mal analysis of the heater is important because it decides the
cathode temperature magnitude and variation of temperature
on the emitting surface of the cathode. The temperature-
dependent material properties of heater wire are taken in the
simulation to account for the nonlinear effects. The heater wire
and heater diameters are denoted as “d” and “dh ,” respectively.
For all simulations here and in Section II-B, the number of
turns is fixed as 9.
The electric voltage has been applied between the end
terminals of the heater to create an electric current, which
is responsible for resistive heating. The radiation boundary
condition has been applied on the heater surface. A current
reaction probe is used to find out the heater current value in the
postprocessing of ANSYS workbench. The simulations were
done for the different applied voltage and wire parameters:
wire diameter “d” swept from 0.5 to 0.8 mm (d = 0.6 mm
is typical for the S-band magnetron heaters [10]); the heater
diameter “dh ” swept from 8 to 12 mm, and the later one is
limited due cathode sleeve inner diameter, which is discussed
in Section II-B; the heater voltage varied from 1 to 10 V
(10 V is the typical heater voltage for the 1.7-MW X-band
magnetrons [12]).
The analytical calculation of heater temperature (1) is also
carried out to validate the simulation results [13]
 
dT I 2 R0 (1 + αT ) − πdεlσ T 4 − Ta4
=   (1)
dt ρd cl π d
2
4
where R0 , α, T , ρ, l, ε, σ , d, T , Ta , ρd , and c are cold resis-
tance, temperature coefficient of the wire, temperature gradi-
ent, resistivity, length of wire, emissivity, Stephen–Boltzmann
coefficient, wire diameter, final temperature, ambient tempera-
ture, material density, and specific heat capacity, respectively.
The left-hand side of (1) should be zero for steady-state
condition, and after some mathematical manipulations, the
final time-independent equation is represented as
V2
αT 5 + (1 − αTa )T4 + αTa T − + αTa4 + Ta4 = 0.
R0 πdεσ l
(2)
MATLAB code is written for the solution of (2) (see
Appendix). There are some input parameters required to run
3382
Fig. 3. Analytical (dotted lines) and ANSYS (solid lines) simulated
results of heater temperature for different applied heater voltage and
heater wire diameters. (a) d = 0.5 mm. (b) d = 0.6 mm. (c) d = 0.7 mm.
(d) d = 0.8 mm.
Fig. 4. Temperature distribution on the heater surface.
this code: wire diameter, heater diameter, pitch, number of
turns, resistivity, and temperature coefficient of resistivity.
The output of this code comes as a graph for the voltage
dependency of the heater temperature. A good agreement
between simulation and analytical calculation was observed
[Fig. 3(a)–(d)] for the different heater wire diameter and
applied voltages. As expected, these analyses show that the
heater temperature increases with the heater wire diameter
increase because the heater current increases and resistance
decreases (P = I 2 R) for the same applied voltage.
Fig. 4 shows the temperature distribution on the heater
surface for the applied voltage of 8 V, as an example, for
the case of d = 0.6 mm and dh = 8 mm. The maximum
temperature on the heater surface is found to be 1584 ◦ C. It is
quite below the melting point of tungsten and 734 ◦ C above
the required temperature of cathode.
The temperature variation dependence on applied voltage
for the different heater diameters (dh ) for a fixed wire diameter
of d = 0.6 mm is shown in Fig. 5. The heater temperature
decreases with an increase of heater diameter due to an
increase of heater resistance. The cathode temperature distribu-
tion uniformity is depending on the distance between the inner
surface of cathode sleeve (dsleeve) and the heater diameter (dh )
(Fig. 6), as discussed in Section II-B.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRON DEVICES, VOL. 69, NO. 6, JUNE 2022
Fig. 5. Heater temperature versus applied voltage for different heater
diameters (dh = 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 mm) at a fixed wire diameter of
d = 0.6 mm.
Fig. 6. Cut view of simulated cathode model.
B. Thermal Simulation of Cathode
This section presents the thermal simulation of the cathode
with the heater. Fig. 6 shows the cut view of the simulation
model of the cathode. It consists of five parts made from
nickel and the W–Re heater, as described above. The electron
emission surface has denoted by the red line. It is required that
the temperature of this surface should be more than 850 ◦ C due
to the work function (1.2–1.5 eV) of triple carbonates of Ba,
Sr, Ca, and coating material, for proper electron emission [13].
The cathode will be heated by the thermal radiation of the
heater. A surface-to-surface radiation boundary condition has
been defined in the ANSYS simulation. This boundary con-
dition allows transferring heat from heater surface to cathode
surface and vice versa.
The main aim is to obtain more than 850 ◦ C on the
electron emission surface for the minimum possible value
of heater temperature, which depends on heater diameter,
as mentioned above. Therefore, the effect of heater diameter
has been examined in terms of the temperature difference
between the cathode emission surface and the heater (Fig. 7).
Here, all the parameters were fixed except heater diameter.
The efficient cathode heating can be achieved by minimizing
the difference in temperature between the heater and cathode
VYAS: THERMAL DESIGN OF MEGAWATT POWER-LEVEL X-BAND COAXIAL MAGNETRON
Fig. 7. Temperature difference between the heater and the cathode for
different heater diameters at different applied voltages.
Fig. 8. Temperature contour plot for (a) cathode sleeve, (b) electron
emitting surface of the cathode sleeve (Fig. 6), and (c) heater.
emission surfaces. This can be achieved by increasing the
diameter of the heater and minimizing the gap between the
cathode sleeve radius and the heater diameter. The minimum
temperature requirement is elongating the heater life.
It is found (Fig. 7) that T decreases by an increase
of heater diameter and more effective on the higher values
of heater voltage. Fig. 8 shows the temperature distribution
for each part of the cathode for the case of dh = 8 mm
and d = 0.6 mm. The maximum temperature of 978 ◦ C is
found on the right-hand side end-hat of the cathode sleeve
[Fig. 8(a)]. This will produce 0.6% nonuniformity of the
emitting surface of the cathode [Fig. 8(b)]: temperature is
uniform about 99.4%. This cathode operates in the space-
charge limiting region and this temperature variation does not
affect the performance of the cathode. It is also found that the
heater temperature is increased by (8.3%) from 1584 ◦ C to
1727 ◦ C [Fig. 8(c)] due to the encloser effect of the cathode
sleeve, compared to Fig. 4 where the only heater was used.
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3383
Fig. 9. Thermal analysis of the complete X-band magnetron without
beam collision. Temperature distribution on (a) heater, (b) electron
emission surface of the cathode, (c) cathode support, and (d) complete
magnetron for heater voltage of 8 V.
III. T HERMAL S IMULATION OF C OMPLETE M AGNETRON
There are two heating sources for the magnetron anode,
which was used for the thermal design of the complete
magnetron: one is the temperature of the cathode and the
other is electron beam collision with the anode. The thermal
analysis is carried out in two steps: without and with electron
beam collision. The estimation of maximum temperature in
each condition is required for the successful development of
magnetron. At the time of cathode activation, the electron
beam does not present, but during this time, the temperature
of the cathode surface is more than 1000 ◦ C. This high
temperature is required for conversion of the carbonates to
oxide, e.g.,

BaCO3 −→ BaO + CO2

CaCO3 −→ CaO + CO2

SrCO3 −→ SrO + CO2 .
The ANSYS simulation model of the complete magnetron
geometry is shown in Fig. 9. The cathode is situated in the
center of the magnetron anode by the cathode support. The
role of cathode support is to keep the cathode at the center
with coaxes of the anode and provide the terminal to apply
the high voltage on it. One major aspect of cathode support in
the thermal design is that it should not drain the temperature
from the cathode. The low thermal conductive [17 W/(m·K)]
3384 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRON DEVICES, VOL. 69, NO. 6, JUNE 2022

material—Kovar—was used as cathode support for this pur- TABLE I

pose. The surface area of cathode sleeve is 630 mm2 . H EAT T RANSFER C OEFFICIENT FOR D IFFERENT WATER F LOW R ATE
In the first step, 8 V (optimal emitting surface temperature)
of heater voltage and natural convection is applied. In this
case, the power loss due to electron beam collision is not
included. The maximum temperature on the heater and cath-
ode emission surface is found to be 1662 ◦ C and 930 ◦ C
[Fig. 9(a) and (b)]. The temperature decreases rapidly along
the length of cathode support [Fig. 9(c)] due to Kovar material
used as support, keeping the cathode temperature constant.
The emitting surface temperature of 930 ◦ C is 80 ◦ C above
the starting temperature of electron emission. This value of
temperature can be used during the magnetron operation.
However, it is 70 ◦ C below the required temperature of cathode
activation; it means that the cathode needs more power to
achieve the temperature of more than 1000 ◦ C. Therefore,
the heater voltage has been increased up to 10 V making the
cathode emitting surface temperature ∼1050 ◦ C. This ensures
that the heater voltage should be 10 V during the cathode
activation process.
Now, the power loss due to beam collision with the anode
block has been included in the simulation. The average power
loss due to beam collision for this magnetron is 1167 W
for 2 MW of output pulse power. The duty cycle of this
magnetron is 0.001. The value of power loss is obtained by the
PIC simulation. This power has been applied to the vane tip
(inner radius surface) of the magnetron in terms of heat flux
as 2.55 × 106 W/m2 . The heat flux is calculated as follows:
Area of single vane tip = 11.4 × 10−6 m 2 (3)
Total number of vanes = 40 (4)
1167W
Heat flux =
40 × 11.4 × 10−6 m 2
W
= 2.55 × 106 2 . (5)
m
The forced water cooling has been applied in terms of heat
transfer coefficient. A classic correlation for the convection
heat transfer for turbulent flow in a pipe is given by the
Dittus–Boelter equation
Nu = 0.0243 Re0.8 Pr0.6 (6)
where Nu, Re, and Pr are Nusselt, Reynolds, and Prandtl
numbers, respectively. The relation between Nusselt number
(Nu) and heat transfer coefficient (h) is given as follows:
hD Fig. 10. Thermal analysis of the complete X-band magnetron with
Nu = (7) beam collision. Temperature distribution on (a) complete magnetron and
k (b) anode block for heater voltage of 8 V, water-cooling flow of 5 L/min.
where D is the diameter of the cooling tube and k is the
thermal conductivity. Reynolds and Prandtl numbers could be
calculated by the following equations: summarized in Table I. The thermal simulation of complete
magnetron has been carried out by using the heat transfer
DV
Re = (8) coefficient values given in Table I. The remaining conditions
μ of heater voltage and heat flux are 10 V and 2.55 × 106 W/m2 ,
μC p respectively.
Pr = (9)
k Fig. 10(a) and (b) shows the thermal simulation results
where V , C p , and μ are the velocity, specific heat, and for the case of 5 L/min of water cooling. The flow rate
viscosity, respectively. The heat transfer coefficient (h) for the of 5 L/min is quite easily achievable for this type of magnetron
different flow rate of water cooling has been calculated and by a simple water pump. The maximum temperature on

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VYAS: THERMAL DESIGN OF MEGAWATT POWER-LEVEL X-BAND COAXIAL MAGNETRON
the outer surface of the magnetron is found at 66 ◦ C. The
maximum temperature of 220 ◦ C is found on the tip of the
anode. This value of temperature is far below the melting
point of copper and baking (vacuum processing) temperature
(≈450 ◦ C) of the magnetron. This thermal analysis concludes
that this magnetron can be used safely without any thermal
issues.
IV. C ONCLUSION
Results of the thermal design of a water-cooled 2-MW
X-band magnetron have been presented. The simulation and
analytical values of heater temperature are found in good
agreement. It is found that the selection of Kovar material
for the cathode support helps to stop the heat drainage from
the cathode emission surface. The heat transfer coefficient of
different flow rates has been calculated and given in Table I.
The outer surface temperature is found at around 66 ◦ C. The
maximum temperature on the anode block is found to be
220 ◦ C for the case of 5 L/min of water-cooling flow, which is
in the safe operating range of magnetron. The overall step-by-
step procedure for the thermal design of magnetron has been
presented.
A PPENDIX
MATLAB CODE. The following code has been written for
solution of heat equation (2) to obtain the heater temperature:
clc;
close all;
clear all;
Ts=300;
sigma=5.67e-8;
alpha=input (‘input the alpha_valu = ’);
emis =input (‘input the emissivity of wire = ’);
d=input (‘input the wire diameter = ’);
N=input (‘input the number of turn = ’);
D=input (‘input the diameter of heater = ’);
rho=input (‘input the resistivity of heater wire = ’);
pich=input (‘input the pitch of heater = ’);
hleg=input (‘input the leg length of heater = ’);
L=(N∗ sqrt((pi∗D)^2+(pich)^2))+hleg;
R0=(4∗ rho∗ L)/(pi∗ d∗ d);
a1 = [alpha];
a2 = [1-(alpha∗Ts)];
a5 = [-alpha∗(Ts^4)];
v=[1:20]
temp = [];
for i=1:20
const = (-v(i)^2/(pi∗d∗ emis∗ sigma∗ R0∗ L)) +
alpha∗ (Ts^5)-Ts^4;
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3385
T = [a1 a2 0 0 a5 const];
sol = roots(T);
for j=1:length(sol);
if imag(sol(j)) == 0;
temp(i) = sol(j)-273;
end
end
hold on
end
plot(v,temp);
xlabel(‘Volatage(Volt)’);
ylabel(‘Temperature(C)’)
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