Another F4E milestone is met. The news comes straight from the F4E contractors, CNIM and SIMIC, who have reported the successful completion of the machining of the two full size radial plate prototypes: one side and one regular.
Radial plates are D-shaped special grade stainless steel plates in which the ITER conductor is embedded. The ITER Toroidal Field coils are “D” shaped coils whose core task is the confinement of plasma. They are composed of a winding pack and a stainless steel coil case.
The side radial plate has been manufactured by CNIM (Toulon, France) utilising seven of 316LN stainless steel forged plates, butt welded between each other with Local Vacuum Electron Beam technology. Each section is fully machined to the final tolerances except the welded areas, machined individually with a local machine after the welding.
The regular radial plate has been manufactured by SIMIC (Camerana, Italy) utilising 16 sections of hipped (Hot Isostatic Pressure) 316LN stainless steel butt welded by Narrow Gap TIG. Each section has been pre-machined before welding leaving extra material and then the whole radial plate has been machined with a large portal machine, now belonging to F4E.
On both radial plates the required tolerances have been achieved. This achievement on one side demonstrates for the first time the feasibility of the radial plate, and on the other side qualifies two different technologies to manufacture them.
F4E is planning to launch soon the tender procedure for the production of 70 radial plates needed to produce the ten EU ITER TF coils.
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