Hydraulic characterization of twin-box joints for ITER magnets

Abstract

The ITER magnet system will be the largest superconducting magnet system ever built. The system, all inside a cryostat, is mainly composed of a Central Solenoid (CS) split in 6 modules, a set of 18 Toroidal Field (TF) d-shaped coils and 6 Poloidal Field (PF) coils. Each of these coils uses variable type of cable-in-conduit-conductors (CICC) actively cooled by a forced supercritical helium flow. Their electrical supply from the current feedthrough of the cryostat is done with Main Busbars (MB) using similar CICC. The electrical MB to coils as well as internal PF and TF coils connections rely on the twin box concept developed by CEA in the early R&D phase. After electrical validation of joint prototypes for the PF and the MB conductors on full size samples, specific hydraulic characterization tasks were done through the Magnet Infrastructure Facilities for ITER (MIFI) contract between ITER Organization (IO) and CEA devoted to develop, improve and qualify manufactured components and assembly processes. These tasks were done on the samples using the CEA OTHELLO dedicated facility able to operate with gaseous N2 in a large Reynolds range at room temperature. The paper explains the way followed to get a full hydraulic characterization of the MB and PF5 joints for the two flow directions. The study of the flow distribution between parallel cooling channels inside the PF5 joint revealed a bypass of the active joint region. The paper reports on this hydraulic behaviour in the relevant magnets operating conditions and outlines the design changes in the joints provoked by the results of this study.