Maintenance study on WCLL-TBS ancillary systems in process room

Abstract

The Water-Cooled Lithium Lead Test Blanket System (WCLL-TBS) is one of the European TBS candidates for being installed and operated in ITER. The ongoing activities toward the Preliminary Design Review of the WCLL-TBS Ancillary Systems include the reallocation of their units in the reserved space, also in the view of the proper execution of the maintenance activities. Starting from the available documentation (System Design Description, Process Flow Diagrams, Process and Instrumentation Diagrams), detailed 3D CAD models have been developed for two Ancillary Systems to be installed in the Process room: the Tritium Extraction System (TES) and the Tritium Accountancy System (TAS). In the Process room (PR), the largest part of the TES process units is placed inside a Glove-box, as enclosure to avoid the contamination of the room in case of radioactive release due to failure of units. Based on the expected radioactivity content, all the TAS units are placed inside the Glove-box. Maintainability studies have been performed, focusing on the preventive (i.e. planned) and corrective (i.e. required by failures) maintenance tasks on the units installed inside the Glove-box. They were based on the 3D CAD models and supported using Virtual Reality as intuitive and immersive human-computer interface. They provided insights for the iterative improvement and consolidation of the Systems design and information for the evaluation of their availability.