Manufacture of ITER feeder sample conductors

The ITER feeders are the components that connect the ITER magnet systems located inside the main cryostat to the cryogenics, power-supply and control system interfaces outside the cryostat. The feeder busbars rely on the Cable-In-Conduit Conductor (CICC) design concept as all the conductors for the ITER magnet systems. There are two types of busbars for the feeder systems. One is the Main Busbar (MB) for the TF, CS and PF feeders, and the other is the Corrector Busbar (CB) for the CC feeders. The busbar cable is wound from multiple stage sub-cables made with Cu and superconducting strands. The superconducting material is NbTi for the busbar strands of all feeder systems. All Feeder conductors are provided by China. The R&D programs are needed to acquire knowledge on the behavior of such conductors. Since the conductors are new, some full size copper dummy conductors have been produced for the testing of the cabling parameters, definition of automatic TIG welding of seamless jacket section, elaboration of cable insertion and compaction. Then, two short qualification conductor samples (MB and CB) are prepared in ASIPP, and NbTi advanced strands are produced by Western Superconductor Technology (WST). The details of manufacturing procedures for Feeder conductor samples will be described in this paper. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.