Thermohydraulic Behaviors of KSTAR PF Superconducting Magnet System in Operation

Abstract

Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) is a superconducting tokamak which adopts and NbTi as superconductors and it has been operated since 2008. One of main issues is the performance of superconducting magnet system in the real operation. In view of this issue, the KSTAR magnet system shows the sufficient operational capability through the whole campaigns. For example, we have already achieved the maximum Toroidal Field (TF) current and the bipolar pulsed Poloidal Field (PF) operation up to ± 10 kA. It is very important to operate stably the full superconducting magnet system such as KSTAR and ITER. Each KSTAR magnet consists of Cable-In-Conduit Conductors (CICC) cooled by forced flow of the supercritical helium in cryogenic temperature. The temperature, pressure and mass flow rate of coolant are interacted organically inside of CICC and the behaviors are also complicated during operation. The pressure drop between inlet and outlet of coil, the temperature increasing in accordance with coil current variation, and so on are critical issues related with the flexibility and reliability of superconducting tokamak. Most of all, we agree that the analysis of thermohydraulic behavior is absolutely needed for more stable operation and higher plasma performance. So we are checking the related data and the tendency at every campaign and we are optimizing the operational procedure to fit the plasma scenario. In this paper, we introduce the significant thermohydraulic behaviors of KSTAR PF coils up to now.