Europe celebrates conductor milestone
7 Mar 2016
Representatives of the ICAS consortium and the European Domestic Agency celebrate an important milestone for ITER magnets—Europe's successful completion of 20 km of toroidal field conductor.
The European Domestic Agency has announced the completion of 20 kilometres of niobium-tin (Nb3Sn) superconductor for ITER's giant D-shaped toroidal field coils.
This represents a little over one-fifth of the total amount of conductor (88 km) required for the machine's 18 magnets plus one spare. Five other ITER Domestic Agencies are contributing toroidal field conductor as part of their in-kind contributions to the project: China, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States.
The European milestone is the result of more than six years of intensive collaboration with industry. The first contracts for the building blocks of the conductors—superconducting strand—went to Luvata (copper strand), Oxford Instruments Superconducting Technology and Bruker European Advanced Superconductors (Nb3Sn strand). The next tasks of cabling, jacketing and spooling were undertaken by the ICAS consortium (ENEA, Tratos and Criotec), which successfully produced 30 toroidal field conductor lengths.
The conductor lengths were progressively delivered to ASG Superconductors SpA in La Spezia, Italy, where winding operations are currently underway.
ITER's toroidal field magnets will create a powerful magnetic cage to confine the hot plasma in the centre of the plasma chamber away from the walls of the vessel. Europe is responsible for producing 10 toroidal field coils and Japan, nine.
Read the full story on the European Domestic Agency website.