Speaker
Description
Significant efforts to advance high temperature superconductor (HTS) and HTS coil technology are underway by privately funded startups with the goal to demonstrate HTS maturity for commercial fusion. The goal for a fusion pilot plant (FPP) is to make 50-100 MW net electricity power plants with either extended long pulses or steady state options. Although a high current, self-field test facility exists without external or background magnetic fields, there are insufficient present magnet cables and in-field coil test facilities in the U.S. There is also a vital need for bigger bore high pulsed field test facilities to de-risk FPP development to validate the AC loss characteristics, quench dynamics of high current fusion cables or insert ohmic heating coils with HTS conductors made in the USA. A large warm bore (22”) fast ramp coil test facility (up to 10 T/s) is presented for next step compact tokamak and compact stellarator devices to understand plasma startup, in-field transients and ac losses of HTS cables. The background field coil can be ramped with positive and negative current up to 20+ kA. A stand-alone conduction cool cryostat assembly can easily be integrated into the 22” large warm bore fast ramp coil testbed. The dummy load coil test facility can be further upgraded from 4T to higher magnetic field (>10T) as a high field pulsed test facility to address critical test needs for the ac loss comparison of HTS cables and HTS model coils. Recent evaluations have shown that commercial Bi-2212 wires are suitable and potentially the only viable high field option for a fast ramp, high field solenoid for compact ST operation. This is significant because most recent studies in support of private fusion have shown promising results of net fusion gain by operating a pulsed tokamak machine.
