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News & Media
Latest ITER Newsline
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Towards DEMO | What will the blanket teach us?
We often hear about the scientific ideas ITER is designed to confirm, but the project also has an important role as a technology demonstrator. The blanket is a [...]
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Summer works | A new chapter opens
Notice anything? Yes, the giant poster (25 x 50 m) on the temporary wall of the Assembly Hall has been removed. Displaying a cutaway of the ITER Tokamak, it had [...]
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Image of the week | On the thruway from Hefei to Shanghai
Over the next four years, China will be shipping approximately 100 large components for the magnet feeder system, adding up to 1,600 tonnes of equipment in all. [...]
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India | Modi praises ITER at UNESCO
In August, while on official visit to France at the invitation of President Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India shared his vision of cooperat [...]
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Vacuum technology | Record-breaking sealing performance
The ITER vacuum vessel, its ports and port extensions, and port plugs all provide the vacuum boundary and first safety confinement barrier of the ITER machine. [...]
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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