The SPARC Toroidal Field Model Coil Program
Abstract
The SPARC Toroidal Field Model Coil (TFMC) Program was a three-year effort between 2018 and 2021 that developed novel Rare Earth Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide (REBCO) superconductor technologies and then successfully utilized these technologies to design, build, and test a first-in-class, high-field (~20 T), representative-scale (~3 m) superconducting toroidal field coil. With the principal objective of demonstrating mature, large-scale, REBCO magnets, the project was executed jointly by the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). The TFMC achieved its programmatic goal of experimentally demonstrating a large-scale high-field REBCO magnet, achieving 20.1 T peak field-on-conductor with 40.5 kA of terminal current, 815 kN/m of Lorentz loading on the REBCO stacks, and almost 1 GPa of mechanical stress accommodated by the structural case. Fifteen internal demountable pancake-to-pancake joints operated in the 0.5 to 2.0 nOhm range at 20 K and in magnetic fields up to 12 T. The DC and AC electromagnetic performance of the magnet, predicted by new advances in high-fidelity computational models, was confirmed in two test campaigns while the massively parallel, single-pass, pressure-vessel style coolant scheme capable of large heat removal was validated. The REBCO current lead and feeder system was experimentally qualified up to 50 kA, and the crycooler based cryogenic system provided 600 W of cooling power at 20 K with mass flow rates up to 70 g/s at a maximum design pressure of 20 bar-a for the test campaigns. Finally, the feasibility of using passive, self-protection against a quench in a fusion-scale NI TF coil was experimentally assessed with an intentional open-circuit quench at 31.5 kA terminal current.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2308.12301,
title = {The SPARC Toroidal Field Model Coil Program},
author = {Zachary Hartwig and Rui Vieira and Darby Dunn and Theodore Golfinopoulos and Brian LaBombard and Christopher Lammi and Phil Michael and Susan Agabian and David Arsenault and Raheem Barnett and Mike Barry and Larry Bartoszek and William Beck and David Bellofatto and Daniel Brunner and William Burke and Jason Burrows and William Byford and Charles Cauley and Sarah Chamberlain and David Chavarria and JL Cheng and James Chicarello and Karen Cote and Corinne Cotta and Van Diep and Eric Dombrowski and Jeffrey Doody and Raouf Doos and Brian Eberlin and Jose Estrada and Vincent Fry and Matthew Fulton and Sarah Garberg and Robert Granetz and Aliya Greenberg and Martin Greenwald and Samuel Heller and Amanda Hubbard and Ernest Ihloff and James Irby and Mark Iverson and Peter Jardin and Daniel Korsun and Sergey Kuznetsov and Chris Lammi and Steven Lane Walsh and Richard Landry and Richard Lations and Matthew Levine and George Mackay and Kristin Metcalfe and Kevin Moazeni and John Mota and Theodore Mouratidis and Robert Mumgaard and JP Muncks and Richard Murray and Daniel Nash and Ben Nottingham and Colin O Shea and Andrew Pfeiffer and Samuel Pierson and Clayton Purdy and Alexi Radovinsky and DJ Ravikumar and Veronica Reyes and Nicolo Riva and Ron Rosati and Michael Rowell and Erica E. Salazar and Fernando Santoro and Dior Sattarov and Wayne Saunders and Patrick Schweiger and Shane Schweiger and Maise Shepard and Syunichi Shiraiwa and Maria Silveira and FT Snowman and Brandon Sorbom and Peter Stahle and Ken Stevens and Joseph Stiebler and Joshua Stillerman and Deepthi Tammana and David Tracy and Ronnie Turcotte and Kiran Uppalapati and Matthew Vernacchia and Christopher Vidal and Erik Voirin and Alex Warner and Amy Watterson and Dennis Whyte and Sidney Wilcox and Michael Wolf and Bruce Wood and Lihua Zhou and Alex Zhukovsky},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.12301},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
17 pages 9 figures, overview paper and the first of a six-part series of papers covering the TFMC Program