Development of advanced superconducting coil technologies for the National Centralized Tokamak

Abstract

Advanced technologies for fabrication of superconducting coils have been developed for the National Centralized Tokamak which is based on modification of JT-60. One of the technologies developed is the application of the react-and-wind (R&W) method of fabrication of a Nb3Al D-shaped coil. The bending strain of 0.4% due to the R&W method did not affect the critical current characteristics. This finding indicates the possibilities that the manufacturing cost of large size coils can be reduced further by downsizing the heat treatment furnace, and large complicated shape coils can be manufactured by using the Nb3Al conductor. Another technology is an advanced winding technique for the reduction of the ac losses of Nb3Sn coils by loading bending strain on the conductor. It was found that 0.2% bending strain is enough to reduce the ac losses to one-fifth at the virgin state. The newly developed NbTi conductor attained both (i) low ac loss of 116 ms in coupling time constant and (ii) low cost owing to the stainless steel wrap of the sub-cables and Ni plated NbTi strands with 11 µm filaments.