Modeling and Simulations of a Laboratory Frequency-Tunable High Power A6 Relativistic Magnetron Variant Utilizing Mechanically Articulating Vane Structures for Cavity Perturbations

High power relativistic magnetron’s operating frequency is largely determined by the physical dimensions of the microwave source and remains fixed throughout its lifecycle. This work utilizes ICEPIC, a 3D fully parallelized particle-in-cell (PIC) code to model a frequency tunable high power relativistic magnetron (A6 variant) by mechanically articulating the internal vane structures for a laboratory source. An excess of 20,000 individual simulations was performed leveraging GALAXY, an end-to-end multi-physics modeling framework that employs high performance computing clusters. Final configurations are downselected and optimized in multiple positions, allowing the source to operate with tunable frequency range of 23.45%, and a non-contiguous total usable frequency range of 32.82%. The downselection criteria required each configuration to produce output power greater than -3 dB from the baseline level; configurations below this threshold were excluded from the dataset. Mode characteristics were assessed to include only those configurations that demonstrated stable operations and minimal mode competition.