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 -

Connecting the brain to the heart

Celebrating the milestone: More than 50,000 cables serving the Tokamak Complex have been identified and uploaded into the cable database. (Click to view larger version...)
Celebrating the milestone: More than 50,000 cables serving the Tokamak Complex have been identified and uploaded into the cable database.
If the tokamak is the heart of ITER then the cables are the central nervous system that connects the body of the machine to its brain. To date, 50,373 cables have been identified and registered in the ITER cable database and the number is increasing daily as the anatomy of ITER develops.

There was consternation during the 2007 ITER Design Review—which scrutinized the ITER design down to the last bolt—when it was realized that cable engineering tasks to build up a centralized cable and routing database had not been incorporated.

This task was subsequently assigned to the Electrical Engineering Division and a working group was established to consider the various requirements for high and low voltage power cables and the more sensitive Instrumentation & Control (I&C) cables used for diagnostics.

Ivone Benfatto, Jashwant Sonara, David Beltran, Joel Hourtoule and the work group established within the Electrical Engineering Division now have their heads above the water... (Click to view larger version...)
Ivone Benfatto, Jashwant Sonara, David Beltran, Joel Hourtoule and the work group established within the Electrical Engineering Division now have their heads above the water...
"When we first started this exercise, we were overwhelmed by the numerous requirements from the users," remembers Jashwant Sonara, electrical engineer, who was sent to the project from the Indian Domestic Agency in spring 2010. One-and-a-half years later, Jashwant, David Beltran and Joel Hourtoule have their heads above the water line and are now managing (Jashwant perfers the word "integrating") the labyrinth of cables that will serve the Tokamak Complex via trays, racks and towers.

The working group has been greatly supported over the past 18 months by the CAD designers who have uploaded an incredible amount of data into the centralized Cable Database.

Thanks to Jashwant Sonara for his contribution to this article.

return to the latest published articles