F4E’s procurement of ITER’s CER system moving forward

F4E’s work on the procurement of ITER’s Continuous External Rogowski (CER) coil system made substantial progress with signature of the procurement contract. This marks an important milestone in F4E’s work in the field of diagnostics as the contract covers the manufacturing of the actual CER coils, the first diagnostics to be delivered to ITER. The contract has been awarded to two companies who jointly tendered: Axon (France), which will deal with the electrical parts of the system, and Sgenia (Spain), which will deal with the mechanical aspects. A manufacturing readiness review meeting has been held between F4E and the contractors in order to verify final preparations for manufacturing, which is expected to start in April.

Progress towards manufacturing follows the successful testing of the prototype and the Final Design Review which was completed in 2013.

The Continuous External Rogowski (CER) coils are to be located outside the vacuum vessel, within the cases of three Toroidal Field (TF) coils. Their purpose is to measure the toroidal current flowing within the contour of the TF coils, which approximates to the plasma current under steady conditions, a key measurement with relevance for safety and plasma control.

The CER coils are formed by two layers of concentric windings insulated by fibreglass and enclosed in a copper-nickel braided sheath. Each coil measures approximately 50 metres in length. By contrast to other common methods of measuring the plasma current, the Rogowski method provides the measurement with a single sensor, resulting in very high reliability.