A high-temperature superconducting dipole floating in the magnetic field of a normal conducting coil has been developed for the Ring Trap (RT)-1 plasma confinement apparatus at the University of Tokyo. The RT-1 device consists of the floating superconducting dipole, a levitation coil made of normal conductor, a vacuum vessel for plasma confinement and detachable services for the floating dipole. This paper describes the design concept and operating scenario of the floating dipole as well as the required services such as a HTS persistent current switch necessary to realize this scenario.Index Terms-Floating dipole, fusion magnet, persistent current mode operation.
The plasma confinement device "RT-1" which had a high temperature superconducting (HTS) floating magnet was constructed for advanced high-beta plasma and fusion research at the University of Tokyo. The high temperature superconducting (HTS) floating magnet is magnetically levitated inside the plasma vacuum vessel. Plasma is confined by a magnetic dipole field around the HTS floating magnet. The HTS floating magnet is operated in persistent-current mode and it consists of an HTS coil, an HTS persistent-current switch (PCS), a pair of demountable joints of current leads, detachable joints of a cooling tube, a thermal shield and a vacuum vessel. The HTS coil and the PCS and the thermal shield are cooled below 20 K by a flow of helium gas through the cooling tube. The floating HTS magnet is designed to operate in the temperature range from 20 K to 30 K without being cooled while it is levitated. We fabricated a persistent-current HTS coil that consists of the HTS coil and the PCS. Persistent-current operations and protection tests were conducted with the persistent-current HTS coil before it was mounted in the floating magnet cryostat. The current-decay rate was 0.9% in an 8 hour operation. The coil energy was safely discharged by inducing PCS quench in a protection test.
Development of the SMES using high temperature superconducting (HTS) coil has progressed as a Japanese national project since FY 2004. The objective of the project is to obtain around twice the normal energy density via an HTS-LTS "hybrid" coil system compared to an LTS coil system. The HTS coil is composed of sixteen double-pancake coils and the double-pancake coil is wound with a Bi2212 Rutherford-type cable. The HTS coil is operated at 4.2 K in liquid helium bath with the LTS coil, and operated at maximum field of 8.9 T. Before we made a hybrid coil system, we verified the design issues using HTS experimental coils. In this paper mechanical compression tests, DC operation tests and thermal runaway tests using the experimental coils are discussed.
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