Ultimate tensile strength testing campaign on ITER pre-compression ring mock-ups

Abstract

ENEA has developed and characterized a high strength glass fibre-epoxy composite as reference material for the manufacture of the two sets of 3 pre-compression rings located at top and bottom of the inner straight leg region of the ITER Toroidal Field (TF) coils. These rings will provide a radial force of about 70 MN/coil at cryogenic temperature pulling the TF coils into contact and reducing toroidal tension in the four outer intercoil structures. The paper describes the ultimate tensile strength (UTS) testing campaign carried out at ENEA Frascati laboratories on six different rings manufactured winding S2 glass fibers on a diameter of 1 m (1/5 of the full scale) by both vacuum pressure epoxy impregnation and filament wet winding techniques. The volumetric glass content was around 70%. The rings were expanded with radial steps of 0.1 mm into a dedicated hydraulic testing machine consisting of 18 radial actuators working in position control with a total capability of 1000 tons. All the mock-ups showed very high tensile strength (1550 MPa is the average of the mean hoop stresses at failure) and a practically constant tensile modulus. The test results are reported and discussed.