The production of the superconducting cables for the toroidal field (TF) magnets of the ITER machine has recently been completed at the manufacturing companies selected during the previous qualification phase. The quality assurance/quality control programs that have been implemented to ensure production uniformity across numerous suppliers include performance tests of several conductor samples from selected unit lengths. The short full-size samples (4 m long) were subjected to DC and AC tests in the SULTAN facility at CRPP in Villigen, Switzerland.In a previous work the results of the tests of the conductor performance qualification samples were reported. This work reports the analyses of the results of the tests of the production conductor samples. The results reported here concern the values of current sharing temperature, critical current, effective strain and n-value from the DC tests and the energy dissipated per cycle from the AC loss tests. A detailed comparison is also presented between the performance of the conductors and that of their constituting strands.
The ITER magnet system is one of the most sophisticated superconducting magnet systems ever designed, with a stored energy of 51 GJ. The coils are wound from Cable-in-Conduit Conductors (CICCs) made of superconducting and copper strands assembled into a multistage rope-type cable, inserted into a conduit of austenitic steel tubes. The ITER Central Solenoid (CS) works in pulsed mode, reaching a peak field of 13 T, thus allowing the induction of a high intensity current in the plasma of the ITER tokamak. This magnet consists of a stack of six modules which include around 125 t of Nb3Sn strands. The production of all CS conductors has been completed and module manufacturing is well underway; throughout the production phase, samples were cut at the extremities of the conductor unit lengths to undergo quality control tests. About 25% of the conductor short samples were tested in current and field at cryogenic conditions at the SULTAN facility in Villigen, Switzerland. This work reports the comparative analysis of the short samples set of test results.
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