Mechanical attachment of the conductor ends in the ITER poloidal field coils

Abstract

The ITER poloidal field (PF) coils are wound from a large cable-in-conduit-conductor, with a stainless steel (SS) jacket. Tapered bonded tails, consisting of shaped steel profiles welded to the conductor ends, are used in these PF coils to mechanically attach the conductor ends to the winding pack. Their main function is to transfer the tensile force from the end of the outermost turn to the adjacent turns by shear through an appropriate thickness of insulating material (glass epoxy). These tails are embedded in the winding pack thus avoiding any local protrusion. Similar tapered bonded tails have been extensively used in large copper coils. However, compared with a standard copper conductor, the tensile force to be transferred to the winding pack is larger in the ITER PF conductor because of the higher tensile stress experienced by the SS jacket (average tensile stress up to 200 MPa). This led to a new hollow tail design capable of transferring the large tensile force carried by the PF coil conductors over a length in the range 600–650 mm. Hollow tails, as opposed to solid tails, provide a larger bonded perimeter for the same effective tail cross section, which also contributes to limiting the peak shear stress in the insulation. As a first step, the geometry of the tail has been optimised through a 1-D analytical straight model that solves the force balance between shear in the insulation and tension in the tail along its length. In a second step, a FEA (finite element analysis) of the most promising configuration has been performed in order to validate the design.