Status of series production and test of the HTS current leads for Wendelstein 7-X

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is responsible for design, production and test of the High Temperature Superconductor (HTS) current leads for the stellarator Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X). In total 14 current leads with a maximum current of 18.2 kA are required. Special feature is the upside-down orientation of the current leads because of the location of the power supplies in the basement of the experimental area of W7-X. One further important requirement is the Paschen tight electrical insulation of current leads and the connection to the bus bar system. Due to some very specific manufacturing steps, budget and time restrictions, it has been mutually decided between the project partners to manufacture most of the components in house, except the HTS stacks which have been produced and delivered by industry. As the semi-finished parts were manufactured in the central workshop of KIT, the assembly of the current leads was performed in the ITEP (Institute for Technical Physics). The final acceptance test of the current leads is performed at KIT, using a dedicated test cryostat assembled beside and connected to the main vacuum vessel of the TOSKA facility. The paper describes the status of the manufacturing of the current leads. In addition attention is given to specific problems that occurred during the manufacturing and testing.     

Status of Wendelstein 7-X construction

Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) represents the continuation of fusion experiments of the stellarator type at the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP). The aim of W7-X is to demonstrate the suitability for a fusion reactor of this alternative type of magnetically confined plasma experiment. W7-X is being built at Greifswald in the northeast of Germany. The size of device (725 tons, height of 5 m, diameter 16 m) and the superconductive magnet system distinguish W7-X from earlier stellarators at IPP. The paper provides a summary of the status of the main components, the mastering of the technical challenges during component acceptance testing and during machine assembly. Latest results of the assembly work are especially highlighted. The scope of the construction of W7-X was modified and additional acceleration measures were implemented to mitigate risks and delays. Some aspects of these changes are explained in this paper.     

Configuration Management for Wendelstein 7-X

A complex system like the large superconducting Wendelstein 7-X stellarator necessitates a dedicated organizational structure which assures permanent consistency between the requirements of its system specification and the performance attributes of all its components throughout its life time. This includes well-defined processes and centrally coordinated information structures. For this purposes the department Configuration Management (CM) has recently been established at W7-X. The detailed tasks of CM for W7-X are oriented along common CM standards and comprise configuration identification, change management, configuration status accounting and configuration verification. While the assembly of W7-X is proceeding some components are still under procurement or even under design. Thus design changes and non-conformances may have a direct impact on the assembly process. Highest priority has therefore been assigned to efficient control of change and non-conformance processes which might delay the assembly schedule.     

Overview of main-mechanical-components and critical manufacturing aspects of the Wendelstein 7-X cryostat

Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) will be the world's largest superconducting helical advanced stellarator. This stellarator concept is deemed to be a desirable alternative for a future power plant like DEMO. The main advance of the static plasma is caused by the three dimensional shape of some of the main mechanical component inside the cryostat. The geometry of the plasma vessel is formed around the three dimensional shape of the plasma. The coils and their support structure are enclosed within the outer vessel. The space between the outer, the plasma vessel and the ports is called cryostat because the vacuum inside provides thermal insulation of the magnet system which is cooled down to 4 K. Due to the different thermal movements of both vessels and the support structure have to be supported separately. 10 cryo legs will bear the coil support structure. The plasma vessel supporting system is divided into two separate systems, allowing horizontal and vertical adjustments. This paper aims to give an overview of the main mechanical components of the cryostat. The authors delineate some disparate and special problems during the manufacturing of the components at the companies in Europe. It describes the current manufacturing and assembly.     

Thermo-mechanical analysis of the Wendelstein 7-X divertor

The stellarator Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) has a divertor consisting of 10 units installed inside the plasma vessel (PV). It was decided not to install the long pulse high-heat flux (HHF) divertor targets at the first two years stage of W7-X operation and to start with an adiabatically cooled test divertor unit (TDU) and shorter plasma pulses operation. This allows to accumulate operation experience with much simpler components, and as a result to adjust accurately the actively cooled HHF divertor which replaces the TDU for the stationary operation. Finite element (FE) analyses have been performed for better understanding of thermo-mechanical problems of divertor targets, and to guide the design of the TDU and HHF divertors. This paper presents the detailed results of the temperature response, the deformation and thermal stress of the divertor components.     

Configuration space control for Wendelstein 7-X

The Wendelstein 7-X stellarator (W7-X) is a superconducting fusion experiment, presently under construction at the Greifswald branch of the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik. W7-X is a device with high geometrical complexity due to the close packing of the components in the cryostat and their complex 3D shape e.g. of the superconducting coils. The tasks of configuration space control are to ensure that all these components do not collide with each other under a set of defined configurations, i.e. at the time of assembly, at 4 K or for various coil currents. To fulfill these tasks sophisticated tools and procedures were developed and implemented within the realm of a newly founded division that focuses on design, configuration control and configuration management.     

Quality assurance during assembly of Wendelstein 7-X

To control all the work and test steps during assembly of Wendelstein 7-X for each major assembly task Quality Assurance and Assembly Plans are used as the central managing instrument. These documents ensure that the order of all steps is carried out as planned and that the envisaged quality will be met. The confirmation of a successful working step often is done by tests and measurement. For each test special instructions were prepared to ensure reproducible and correct results. The tests are either carried out by the certified QA inspectors of the project or by specially qualified internal inspectors. The most important tests and measurements are outlined briefly. All quality deviations are assessed in relation of consequences for later operation.     

Hydraulic analysis of the Wendelstein 7-X cooling loops

Actively water cooled in vessel components (IVC) are required for the long pulse operation of the stellarator Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X). In total, the cooling pipes have a length of about 4.5 km, supplying the coolant via 304 cooling circuits for the IVC. Within each cooling loop, the IVC are organized mostly in parallel. A homogeneous flow through all branches or at least the minimum specified flow in all of the branches of a circuit is crucial for the IVC to withstand the loading conditions. A detailed hydraulic simulation model of the W7-X cooling loops was built with the commercial code Flowmaster, which is a 1-D computational fluid dynamics software. In order to handle the huge amount of pipe-work data that had to be modelled, a pre- and post-processing macro was developed to transfer the 3D Catia V5 CAD model to the 1-D piping model. Within this model, the hydraulic characteristics of different types of first wall components were simulated, and compared with their pressure drop measurements. As a result of this work, the need for optimization of some cooling loops has been identified and feasible modified solutions were selected.     

Thermo-mechanical analysis of Wendelstein 7-X plasma facing components

The stellarator experiment Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) is designed for stationary plasma operation (30 min). Plasma facing components (PFCs) such as the divertor targets, baffles, heat shields and wall panels are being installed in the plasma vessel (PV) in order to protect it and other in-vessel components. The different PFCs will be exposed to different magnitude of heat loads in the range of 100 kW/m²–10 MW/m² during plasma operation. An important issue concerning the design of these PFCs is the thermo-mechanical analysis to verify their suitability for the specified operation phases. A series of finite element (FE) simulations has been performed to achieve this goal. Previous studies focused on the test divertor unit (TDU) and high heat flux (HHF) target elements. The paper presents detailed FE thermo-mechanical analyses of a prototype HHF target module, baffles, heat shields and wall panels, as well as benchmarking against tests.     

Design,manufacture and testing of the glow discharge electrodes for Wendelstein 7-X

The electrodes for the Wendelstein 7-X glow discharge system have been designed, tested and manufactured. The compact design relies on a cooled housing, integrated into the first wall cooling system, and a calotte-shaped graphite anode. The new mounting concept avoids the need of active cooling of the anode due to an improved thermal conduction. Comprehensive tests of a prototype electrode had been carried out in laboratory and in the ASDEX Upgrade Tokamak during two operation campaigns. The electrode showed excellent and reliable long-time discharge behavior and fulfilled all the requirements regarding temperature limits and maintainability resulting from the steady-state operation of W7-X.     

The procurement and testing of the stainless steel in-vessel panels of the Wendelstein 7-X Stellarator

320 In-vessel water cooled stainless steel panels, poloidal closure plates and pumping gap panels, covering an area of approximately 100 m², are used in Wendelstein7-X to protect the plasma vessel. The panels are manufactured at Deggendorf, Germany by MAN Diesel & Turbo SE. The panels consist of a laser welded sandwich of stainless steel plates together with a labyrinth of cooling channels and have a complicated geometry to fit the plasma vessel of Wendelstein 7-X. The hydraulic and mechanical stability requirements whilst maintaining the tight tolerances for the shape of the components are very demanding. The panels are designed to operate at up to an average heat load of 100 kW/m² and a maximum heat load of 200 kW/m² with a water velocity of approximately 2 m s^?1. High heat flux testing of an un-cooled panel at a time averaged load of 200 kW/m² for 10 s were successfully performed to support the start up phase of Wendelstein 7-X operation. Extensive testing both during manufacture and after delivery to IPP-Garching demonstrates the suitability of the delivered panels for their purpose.     

Thermo-mechanical tests on W7-X current lead flanges

Fourteen pieces of high temperature superconducting current leads (CL) arranged in seven pairs, will be installed on the outer vessel of Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator. In order to support the CL, it is provided with two glass fiber reinforce plastic (GFRP) flanges, namely, the lower cryostat flange (CF) remaining at room temperature and upper radial flange (RF) at about 5 K. Both the flanges i.e. CF & RF experience high mechanical loads with respect to the CL, due to the evacuation of W7-X cryostat, cool-down of cold mass including the CL, electro-magnetic forces due to current & plasma operations and self weight of CL. In order to check the integrity of these flanges for such mechanical loads, thermo-mechanical tests were carried out on these flanges at room temperatures and at liquid nitrogen (LN2) temperatures. The details of test set-up, results and modeling are described in the paper.     

Influence of construction errors on Wendelstein 7-X magnetic configurations

Wendelstein 7-X, currently under construction at the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik in Greifswald, Germany, is a modular advanced stellarator, combining the modular coil concept with optimised properties of the plasma. The magnet system of the machine consists of 50 non-planar and 20 planar superconducting coils which are arranged in five identical modules, forming a toroidal five-fold symmetric system. The majority of operational magnetic configurations will have rotational transform ι/2π = 1 at the boundary. Such configurations are very sensitive to symmetry breaking perturbations, which are the consequence of imprecisely manufactured coils or assembly errors. To date, all 70 coils have been fabricated, and the first two half-modules of the machine have been assembled. The comparative analysis of manufactured winding packs and estimates of the corresponding level of magnetic field perturbation are presented. The dependency of the error fields on the coil assembly sequence is considered, as well as the impact of the first assembly errors. The influence of different construction uncertainties is discussed, and measures to minimise the magnetic field perturbation are suggested.     

Thermal analysis of the Mirnov coils of Wendelstein 7-X

Mirnov coils are used to measure fluctuations of the magnetic field which are in particular generated by magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) modes. The underlying plasma currents have a multipolar structure in a poloidal cross-section. Therefore the amplitude of the magnetic fluctuations decays quickly with increasing distance from the plasma edge. It is hence important to place the Mirnov coils as close to the plasma edge as possible where they are exposed to high thermal loads. Two types of Mirnov coils are proposed to be used in Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X). Type 1 (44 Mirnov coils) should be mounted on the plasma side of wall protection panels with a graphite cap to shield them from direct plasma exposure. Type 2 (137 Mirnov coils) will be located behind the tiles of the heat shields. An important issue concerning the design of these Mirnov coils is to verify their suitability for steady state operation from the thermal point of view. Both steady state and transient finite element thermal analyses were performed for the Mirnov coils under different conditions and with different designs. The paper presents detailed thermal analyses of the Mirnov coils.     

Reverse engineering process of cryostat components of Wendelstein 7-X

The Wendelstein 7-X stellarator is a superconducting fusion experiment, presently under construction at the Greifswald branch of the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik. This paper gives an overview of the reverse engineering processes applied on cryostat components of the W7-X superconducting magnet system.     

Challenges in the realization of the In-Vessel-Components of Wendelstein 7-X

The In-Vessel Components (IVC) for the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator at the Institute for Plasma-Physics (IPP), to be installed for the initial phase of operation, are nearing completion and a significant fraction of the components was delivered in 2011 and 2012. Due to the considerable amount of different components including many variants, the timely realization required a comprehensive management approach, not only covering the demanding technology and system requirements, but also coordination, planning and control issues. A variety of tools were set up to address the technical, financial and timescale challenges. The implementation of this comprehensive management approach is illustrated by the production of the water-cooling system of the IVC. Careful design and manufacture of these components is needed to fulfil the cooling function under high vacuum conditions within very restricted available space. The evolution of the complexity of these components together with changes of boundary conditions had to be managed, integrated into the overall project planning and adequately resourced.     

Thermal and mechanical analysis of Wendelstein 7-X thermal shield

The thermal insulation of Wendelstein 7-X cryostat consists of multi-layer insulation (MLI) and a thermal shield. The shield is cooled by helium gas flowing in pipes which are attached to the shields via copper strips or braids. The paper presents the basic thermal and mechanical layout of the thermal shield. The design is strongly influenced by the tight design space.Main mechanical loads on the shield are electromagnetic forces resulting from rapid shut down of the magnet system and the self weight. Design and calculations were performed iteratively. Copper and brass were checked in combination with different electrical isolation variants. The induced eddy currents will be reduced if the upper and the lower half shells of the cryostat are electrically isolated against each other. The cryostat shield and the port shields are made of brass.The expected heat loads on the shield were estimated. The resulting temperature distribution was then calculated for brass and copper shield panels. The average shield temperature is below 85 K and fulfills the thermal requirements.     

On the accuracy of port assembly at Wendelstein 7-X

Wendelstein 7-X uses 254 ports for diagnostic and supply purposes. Actually 176 ports are final adjusted and welded. The major number of ports meets the general position tolerances of typically 4, …, 8 mm after assembly without countermeasures. 3D metrology turned out to be an essential factor to achieve required adjustment accuracy as well as to control welding process. The measurement accuracy of typically 0.3, …, 0.6 mm proved to be appropriated for all adjustment and control processes inside the experimental hall. A consequent application of 3D metrology can substitutes trail assembly steps and saves process time. Even reduced tolerances of special ports (AEV and AEK-V2) are achieved using appropriated assembly, welding and metrology procedures.     

Manufacturing of the Wendelstein 7-X divertor and wall protection

The in-vessel components of Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) with a total surface of 265 m² comprise the divertor and the wall protection. The high heat flux (HHF) and lower heat flux (LHF) target, the baffle, the end plates closing the divertor chamber, a cryo vacuum pump (CVP) and a control coil form one divertor unit. Steel panels and the graphite heat shield protect the wall, including the ports. The HHF target elements, the steel panels and the control coils are manufactured by industry. The remaining components will be manufactured by the Max-Planck-Institute für Plasmaphysik (IPP) at its Garching workshops. For all components the final acceptance tests will be performed by IPP. This paper summarizes the main aspects for manufacturing, the preceding development and qualification tests as well as the final acceptance tests for the in-vessel components.     

Results and consequences of high heat flux testing as quality assessment of the Wendelstein 7-X divertor

The series manufacturing of the first 282 Wendelstein 7-X divertor elements was concluded in 2011. The divertor is designed to remove a steady-state heat load of 10 MW/m². 940 target elements of five different types made of CuCrZr heat sinks and covered with 16,000 CFC NB31 flat-tiles have to be produced. Additional to quality assessment during the manufacturing process, a final assessment of the delivered elements with operational heat load is indispensable to ensure a constant high thermal performance of the installed divertor.Based on the results of the pre-series testing a statistical quality assessment method has been developed for the series production. The application of this method to the series elements ensures their thermal performance with reasonable high heat flux test effort.