A New Enclosed Method for Transverse Mechanical Testing on CICC Conductors

CFETR, the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor, is a new tokamak reactor under preliminary design, where the toroidal field coils were designed to generate a magnetic field of 14.3 T. Here the TF conductors are required to operate under a Lorentz force of 1200 kN/m while keeping stable performance. For these requirements, the main goal is to limit the degradation of the conductor. According to the previous study, the conductor can be analyzed with a mechanical method to evaluate the conductor-performance in the electromagnetic field. In this method, the force was distributed equally from the up and downside of the press modules, which has notches in the middle of the conduit. The stress distribution is quite different from the accumulated stress in the Lorentz force direction. Moreover, the strand extension has been found in the notches. Considering these conditions, a new method where the cable surrounded by an enclosed module was designed to simulate this kind of accumulative stress in the cable. The new module is defined as an enclosed jacket press method compared to the former method (jacket with notches) developed at the University of Twente. In this study, the cable's mechanical properties tested by two different modules were compared. The results were analyzed to evaluate the similarity of different press methods for EM simulation. The result shows that the cable pressed with an enclosed module jacket provided more similar deformation trends when comparing to the distribution of electromagnetic stress within the cable.