IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON APPLIED SUPERCONDUCTIVITY, VOL. 21, NO. 3, JUNE 2011 1953
Status Report of the EDIPO Project
Alfredo Portone, Maurizio Bagnasco, Bill Baker, Pierluigi Bruzzone, Francesca Cau, Elena Fernandez-Cano,
Ettore Salpietro, Pietro Testoni, Eckhard Theisen, Martin Vogel, and Rainer Wesche
Abstract—The aim of this paper is to present an up to date review
of the status of the European DIPOle (EDIPO) project whose ob-
jective is to build a new facility to perform both DC and AC tests of
large superconductor samples in high magnetic background field
(up to 12.5 T). EDIPO was designed by EFDA, is being built
by BNG (Babcock-Noell) and, once completed, it shall be installed
near the existing SULTAN facility at the Paul-Scherer-Institute,
(CRPP, Villigen, Switzerland). The results presented focus on the
manufacture of the dummy coil (which is a 1:1 model of one of the
EDIPO poles) that was completed in spring 2009. Details are given
about the dummy coil winding results, coil reaction heat treatment,
impregnation and acceptance tests. Moreover, a progress status is
provided about the manufacturing of the other parts of the EDIPO
magnet assembly, in particular with respect to the manufacturing
of the test-well, AC coils, yoke sheets cutting and assembly, the
outer cylinder production and welding (316 LN steel, 35 mm thick)
and the coils ends preparation. Some results regarding the R&D
studies are also reported about the winding trials carried out to im-
prove the winding accuracy and the numerical simulations made
to support coil winding (e.g. conductor spring back).
Index Terms—Cable-in-conduit, fusion reactors, supercon-
ducting magnets.
I. INTRODUCTION AND PROJECT OVERVIEW
T
HE European Dipole (EDIPO) project (Table I, Figs. 1,
2, [1]) aims to build a high field magnet made by a pair
of tilted heads race track superconducting coils wound by using
two different types of Cable-In-Conduit Conductors featuring
strands. EDIPO is designed to produce a DC field
over a length inside a 10 cm 15 cm bore
and to generate, with , a time-varying field AC field
with . This facility shall be used
to test ITER CICCs and other superconductors with current up
to 100 kA.
The Euratom contribution to the project cost (see Fig. 3) is
4.52 M euros, which is within the originally (2006) budgeted
cost of 4.56 M euros.
As far as the schedule is concerned, EDIPO was planned to
be completed by the end of August 07 and its installation and
commissioning at CRPP-PSI finished by March 2008.
Manuscript received August 03, 2010; accepted October 24, 2010. Date of
publication December 23, 2010; date of current version May 27, 2011.
A. Portone, B. Baker, E. Fernandez-Cano, E. Salpietro, and P. Testoni are
with Fusion For Energy, Barcelona 08019, Spain (e-mail: alfredo.portone@f4e.
europa.eu).
M. Bagnasco, P. Bruzzone, F. Cau, M. Vogel, and R. Wesche are with
EPFL-CRPP, Fusion Technology, Villigen PSI CH-5232, Switzerland (e-mail:
pierluigi.bruzzone@psi.ch).
E. Theisen is with Babcock Noell GmbH, Würzburg 97080, Germany (e-mail:
Eckhard.Theisen@babcocknoell.de).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
TABLE I
EDIPO MAIN PARAMETERS
Fig. 1. EDIPO cross section with the DC coils made of the HF (elongated) and
LF (square) conductor, the AC coils winding (black area) above and below the
rectangular bore and the iron yoke cross section (dashed area). From left to right,
the DC winding is made by 1 double layer of HF1 type (8 8 turns), 1 of HF2
type (9 9 turns), 1 of LF1 type (14 14 turns) and 4 double layers of LF2
type of 14 14 turns each except the last one of 13 13 turns (see Table II).
Two major events delayed the project schedule, namely (a)
the poor performances of the two original CIC conductors tested
in July 2006 [2] and (b) the DC coil winding procedure that,
by the end of 2008 once the dummy coil was completed, ex-
hibited large geometrical variation with respect to the reference
dimensions as well as heavy damages to the coil turn insulation
(Fig. 4). Such delays in the magnet procurement have led to a
substantial re-scheduling of the whole project to accommodate
several design changes, new cabling and conductor manufac-
turing, further conductor qualification, new winding line com-
missioning, etc. The new target date for manufacturing is the
end of November 2010 and for installation and commissioning
end of June 2011.
II. EDIPO KEY FEATURES
Each EDIPO DC coil (or “pole”) is made of a racetrack-shape
coil whose two ends are bent out-of-plane by 37 deg. Each
pole is made of 7 double layers wound from CICCs and it is
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