Subscribe options

Select your newsletters:

Please enter your email address:

@

Your email address will only be used for the purpose of sending you the ITER Organization publication(s) that you have requested. ITER Organization will not transfer your email address or other personal data to any other party or use it for commercial purposes.

If you change your mind, you can easily unsubscribe by clicking the unsubscribe option at the bottom of an email you've received from ITER Organization.

For more information, see our Privacy policy.

News & Media

Latest ITER Newsline

  • Test facility | How do electronics react to magnetic fields?

    A tokamak is basically a magnetic cage designed to confine, shape and control the super-hot plasmas that make fusion reactions possible. Inside the ITER Tokamak [...]

    Read more

  • ITER Robots | No two alike

    More than 500 students took part in the latest ITER Robots challenge. Working from the same instructions and technical specifications, they had worked in teams [...]

    Read more

  • Data archiving | Operating in quasi real time

    To accommodate the first real-time system integrated with the ITER control system, new components of the data archiving system have been deployed. Data archivi [...]

    Read more

  • Repairs | Setting the stage for a critical task

    Like in a game of musical chairs—albeit in slow motion and at a massive scale—components in the Assembly Hall are being transferred from one location to another [...]

    Read more

  • Image of the week | There is life on Planet ITER

    Dated April 2023, this new image of the ITER "planet" places the construction site squarely in the middle. One kilometre long, 400 metres wide, the IT [...]

    Read more

Of Interest

See archived entries

ITER NEWSLINE -

Image of the week

Keeping an eye on the hot (double) pancake

An ITER ring-shaped coil begins its existence as cable-in-conduit conductor, wound into "double pancakes" that are eventually stacked one upon the other to form the winding pack at the core of the finalized coil. At one point in the fabrication process, each individual double pancake must be resin-impregnated in order to ensure its electrical insulation.

Data fed by approximately one hundred sensors is displayed on large screens and closely examined by the Fusion for Energy team responsible for the impregnation of the first of the eight double pancakes required for poloidal field coil #4. (Click to view larger version...)
Data fed by approximately one hundred sensors is displayed on large screens and closely examined by the Fusion for Energy team responsible for the impregnation of the first of the eight double pancakes required for poloidal field coil #4.
The impregnation process is a long and delicate operation: tightly wrapped in insulating fiberglass tape, the double pancake is placed into a leak-tight mould. Several hundred litres of epoxy resin is injected at a temperature of 55-60 °C. As temperature is ramped up and extra pressure applied, the micro spaces inside the winding are filled and the double pancake eventually turns into a massive, rock solid block the colour of burned caramel.

Temperature, the quality of the vacuum inside the mould, and the intensity of the injection pressure must be closely monitored at all times.

In this image, data fed by approximately one hundred sensors is displayed on large screens and closely examined by the European Domestic Agency (Fusion for Energy) team responsible for the impregnation of the first of eight double pancakes required for poloidal field coil #4 (which will be 24 metres in diameter and weigh 350 tonnes).

Three other double pancakes are in various stages of fabrication in the on-site Poloidal Field Coil Winding Facility: one is ready to be impregnated; another is being finalized, and a third is taking shape on the winding table.

return to the latest published articles