Design progress of the SANS instrument at CPHS

Progress has been made since we presented the preliminary physical design of the new time-of-flight SANS instrument at the Compact Pulsed Hadron Source (CPHS) in Tsinghua University during the UCANS-I meeting. The final physical design of the SANS instrument was approved in January 2011 and engineering construction has began. The design of collimator and beamline shielding is completed. A prototypical bandwidth chopper was fabricated and initial tests of the mechanical performance were satisfactory. An evaluation of two in-house-made LPSDs carried out at Hokkaido University showed a reasonable pulse-height spectrum and an as-expected spatial resolution of 8 mm. The design of the front-end electronics and data acquisition system are currently under way.