ITER CS Quench Detection System and Its Qualification by Numerical Modeling

Abstract

The ITER Central Solenoid (CS) magnet needs to be protected against overheating of the conductor in the event of the occurrence of a normal zone (NZ). Due to a large amount of stored energy and slow NZ propagation, the NZ needs to be detected and the switchyard needs to open the breakers within 2 s after detection of the NZ. The CS will be discharged on a dump resistor with a time constant of 7.5 s. During operation of the CS and its interaction with the poloidal field (PF) coils and plasma current, the CS experiences large inductive voltages from multiple sources, including nonlinear signals from eddy currents in the vacuum vessel and plasma current variation, that makes the task of detecting the resistive signal even more difficult. This inductive voltage needs to be cancelled by quench detection (QD) hardware (e.g., bridges, converters, filters, processors) and appropriate processing of the QD signals to reliably detect NZ initiation and propagation. Two redundant schemes are proposed as the baseline for the CS QD System: 1) A scheme with Regular Voltage Taps (RVT) from triads of Double Pancakes (DP) supplemented by Central Difference Averaging (CDA) and by digital suppression of the inductive voltage from all active coils (the CS and PF coils). Voltage taps are taken from helium outlets at the CS outer diameter. 2) A scheme with Cowound Voltage Taps (CVTs) taken from cowound wires routed from the helium inlet at the CS inner diameter. Summary of results of the numerical modeling of the performance of both baseline CS QD systems is presented in this paper.