4C code analysis of thermal-hydraulic transients in the KSTAR PF1 superconducting coil

The KSTAR tokamak, in operation since 2008 at the National Fusion Research Institute in Korea, is equipped with a full superconducting magnet system including the central solenoid (CS), which is made of four symmetric pairs of coils PF1L/U-PF4L/U. Each of the CS coils is pancake wound using Nb3Sn cable-in-conduit conductors with a square Incoloy jacket. The coils are cooled with supercritical He in forced circulation at nominal 4.5 K and 5.5 bar inlet conditions. During different test campaigns the measured temperature increase due to AC losses turned out to be higher than expected, which motivates the present study. The 4C code, already validated against and applied to different types of thermal-hydraulic transients in different superconducting coils, is applied here to the thermal-hydraulic analysis of a full set of trapezoidal current pulses in the PF1 coils, with different ramp rates. We find the value of the coupling time constant n tau that best fits, at each current ramp rate, the temperature increase up to the end of the heating at the coil outlet. The agreement between computed results and the whole set of measured data, including temperatures, pressures and mass flow rates, is then shown to be very good both at the inlet and at the outlet of the coil. The nz values needed to explain the experimental results decrease at increasing current ramp rates, consistently with the results found in the literature. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.