Cable Twist Pitch Variation in Conductors for ITER Toroidal Field Coils in Japan

In March 2010, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) was the first to start the mass production of toroidal field (TF) conductors among the six parties who were procuring TF conductors in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project. The height and width of the TF coils are 14 m and 9 m, respectively. The conductor is a cable-in-conduit conductor with an operating current of 68 kA. A circular multistage superconducting cable is inserted into a circular stainless steel jacket with a thickness of 2 mm. A total of 900 Nb3Sn strands and 522 copper strands are cabled around the central spiral and then wrapped with stainless steel tape whose thickness is 0.1 mm. The superconducting cables are inserted into the jacket assembled using the automatic butt Tungsten Inert Gas welding technique. Cable insertion is one of the key technologies in the jacketing process because the gap between the inner surface of the jacket and the outer diameter of the superconducting cable is only 2 mm in diameter. It was observed that the cabling pitch of the destructive sample is longer than the original pitch at cabling. JAEA carried out the tensile tests of the cable and the measurement of the cable rotation during the insertion to investigate the cause of the elongation. The cause of elongation was clarified, and the results are described in this paper.