[Table of Contents]

Plasma and Fusion Research

Volume 4, 020 (2009)

Regular Articles


Construction and Operation of an Internal Coil Device, RT-1, with a High-Temperature Superconductor
Yuichi OGAWA, Zensho YOSHIDA, Junji MORIKAWA, Haruhiko SAITO, Sho WATANABE, Yoshihisa YANO, Shoichi MIZUMAKI1) and Taizo TOSAKA1)
Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8568, Japan
1)
TOSHIBA corporation, Yokohama 230-0045, Japan
(Received 30 December 2008 / Accepted 9 March 2009 / Published 15 May 2009)

Abstract

An internal coil device called Ring Trap-1 (RT-1) has been constructed to explore an innovative concept for a high-beta plasma based on a new relaxation theory. A high-temperature superconductor (HTS) Bi-2223 tape is employed for the internal coil of RT-1. The coil is cooled to 20 K with helium gas supplied by G-M refrigerators, and charged to a magnetomotive force of 250 kA using an external power supply. For these cooling and charging methods, we have developed several innovative techniques such as a demountable transfer tube system, persistent current switch, detachable electrode, and others. In addition, we have paid much attention to the deterioration of the HTS tape during the fabrication of the internal coil. As a result, we have demonstrated that the decay of the persistent current of the internal coil is ∼1% during 8 h. The internal coil is lifted with a levitation coil located at the upper region of the vacuum vessel. The coil position monitored with laser sensors is feedback controlled through the regulation of the levitation coil current. Stable levitation for a few hours has been demonstrated for various plasma experiments.


Keywords

internal coil device, high temperature superconductor, persistent current switch, magnetic levitation, relaxation theory, high-beta plasma

DOI: 10.1585/pfr.4.020


Movie

Plasma produced by 8.2 GHz microwaves, where the internal coil is floating. The pulse duration is 1 s.

Windows Media Video file (404Kbytes)
MP4 file (609Kbytes)


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This paper may be cited as follows:

Yuichi OGAWA, Zensho YOSHIDA, Junji MORIKAWA, Haruhiko SAITO, Sho WATANABE, Yoshihisa YANO, Shoichi MIZUMAKI and Taizo TOSAKA, Plasma Fusion Res. 4, 020 (2009).