Speaker
Description
According to the European Roadmap to Fusion Electricity, DEMO in Europe is considered to be the nearest-term reactor design to follow ITER and capable of producing electricity and to be a facilitating machine between ITER and a commercial reactor; to achieve this goal the capital costs has to be minimized, including the construction cost of magnets and conductors. Despite the successful large industrial production the performances of Nb3Sn ITER type conductors still have a significant margin for improvements. Two advanced Nb3Sn cable in conduit conductors (SPC-RW1 and ENEA-WR2) have been designed, manufactured and tested in the frame of the Eurofusion R&D for the European DEMO reactor. A comparison of the effective strain has shown a clear improvement with respect the ITER production conductors: from effective strain in the range of -0.6% to -0.9 % (getting slightly more negative after electromagnetic cycling) for ITER TF conductors to about -0.5% for ENEA-WR2 and about -0.3% for SPC-RW1. Such improvements lead to an increase of the average Ic in the strands which can be quantified to be about two to three times (at the same operating conditions). In terms of the amount of Nb3Sn strand required for the construction of the TF magnet system, such improvements may lead to a reduction of factor 2 to 3, corresponding to several hundreds of tons of Nb3sn strand.
| Submitters Country | Switzerland |
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