Baking of SST-1 vacuum vessel modules and sectors

Abstract

SST-1 Tokamak is a steady state super-conducting tokamak for plasma discharge of 1000 sec duration. The plasma discharge of such long time duration can be obtained by reducing the impurities level, which will be possible only when SST-1 vacuum chamber is pumped to ultra high vacuum. In order to achieve UHV inside the chamber, the baking of complete vacuum chamber has to be carried out during pumping. For this purpose the C-channels are welded inside the vacuum vessel. During baking of vacuum vessel, these welded channels should be helium leak tight. Further, these U-channels will be in accessible under operational condition of SST-1. So, it will not possible to repair if any leak is developed during experiment. To avoid such circumstances, a dedicated high vacuum chamber is used for baking of the individual vacuum modules and sectors before assembly so that any fault during welding of the channels will be obtained and repaired. This paper represents the baking of vacuum vessel modules and sectors and their temperature distribution along the entire surface before assembly.