Select your newsletters:
Please enter your email address:
@
News & Media
Latest ITER Newsline
-
Component delivery| A jewel in a box
Sailing under the flag of Germany, the Regine is a mighty ship, strengthened for heavy cargo and equipped on its portside with two 750-tonne on-board cranes. Ha [...]
-
Education | Make your own tokamak with 3D printing!
It's not Lego, but it is definitely 'hands-on.' To offer a tangible device to illustrate the workings of magnetic confinement fusion in a tokamak, the ITER Orga [...]
-
Worksite | Europe's Fusion for Energy is building the ITER installation
Anyone driving to ITER can take full measure of the enormity of the project a few kilometers before reaching the destination. Gigantic cranes can be seen from a [...]
-
Disruption mitigation | Experts in plasma disruptions gather online
On 20-23 July, 120 international experts participated in the 1st IAEA Technical Meeting on Plasma Disruptions and their Mitigation, jointly organized by the Int [...]
-
Start of assembly | World dignitaries celebrate a collaborative achievement
Due to the constraints imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the crowd in the ITER Assembly Hall was small. But thanks to live broadcasting and video feed, the audi [...]
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.
return to the latest published articles