12 minutes to understand TF coil manufacturing

4 Mar 2013

You can see the two 6-minute videos on F4E's website.

Each toroidal field coil is made up of a winding pack (seven double pancakes plus radial plate) and a protective shell of stainless steel. At the La Spezia winding line, 750-metre lengths of toroidal field conductor will be bent into a D-shaped double spiral trajectory, and their length controlled to an accuracy of 500th of a millimetre per metre.

The magnets responsible for confining the ITER plasma—the eighteen D-shaped toroidal field coils—will form an impressive superstructure within the ITER machine: at approximately 6,000 tonnes (coils plus cases), they will represent over one-fourth of the Tokamak's total weight.

In two new videos produced by the European Domestic Agency, we are taken inside a vast manufacturing facility in La Spezia, Italy, where preparations are under way for the fabrication of ten toroidal field coils (nine plus one spare) that are part of the European contribution to ITER.

From winding through heat treatment and on to insertion into radial plates, the toroidal field coil manufacturing process is complex and exacting, requiring unprecedented levels of tolerances and performance. In the videos, experts from the ASG consortium* and Europe speak of the technical challenges, the specialized tooling, and the qualification work underway.

*ASG consortium: Iberdrola Ingeniería y Construcción SAU, ASG Superconductors SpA and Elytt Energy SL

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