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Latest ITER Newsline
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Cryolines | Another day, another spool
Having wedged his body and equipment into the cramped space between the ceiling and the massive pipe, a worker is busy welding two cryolines spools. A few metre [...]
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Image of the week | Bearings unveiled
The construction teams are in the last stages of preparing the Tokamak pit for the first major operation of ITER machine assembly: the lowering of the cryostat [...]
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Technology | Perfecting tritium breeding for DEMO and beyond
While ITER will never breed tritium for its own consumption, it will test breeding blanket concepts—the tools and techniques that designers of future DEMO react [...]
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Fusion world | Japan and Europe complete the assembly of JT-60SA
The JT-60SA fusion experiment in Naka, Japan, is designed to explore advanced plasma physics in support of the operation of ITER and next-phase devices. After s [...]
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Manufacturing | Thermal shield milestone in Korea
Six years after the start of fabrication, Korean contractor SFA has completed the last 40° sector of vacuum vessel thermal shield. The stainless steel panels, c [...]
ITER NEWSLINE -
And now, it's for keeps!
At first view, nothing distinguishes the current operations in the Poloidal Field Coils Winding Facility from those that got underway last November: steel-jacketed conductor is being unspooled, straightened, cleaned, bent to the correct angle, and wrapped with layers of insulating tape ... technicians in white lab coats are carefully performing dimensional checks ... and there is the same machine hum and flash of orange lights.
The real thing—production winding—has started for poloidal field coil #5. In this on-site facility at ITER, Europe will produce the four largest poloidal field coils.
The difference lies in the heart of the steel-jacketed component. In the dummy conductor, the strands were one hundred percent copper. This less-expensive material—which respected the actual dimensions of the true conductor—was a good choice for qualifying the production line; contractors used it to first produce a semi-winding (four turns) and then a full two-layer dummy double pancake.
In the actual conductor, the strands consist of a mix of copper and of the superconducting alloy niobium-titanium. Four poloidal field coils (out of the six needed for the machine), will be manufactured by Europe in the Poloidal Field Coils Winding Facility. With diameters of 17 to 24 metres and weights ranging from 200 to 400 tonnes, these impressive components will require approximately 18 months each to manufacture.
Two smaller ring coils, with diameters of approximately 8 metres, are in production now in Russia and China.
See a recent report from the European Domestic Agency on fabrication activities for poloidal field coils #5 and #6 here.
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