A continuous winding scheme for superconducting tokamak coils with cable-in-conduit conductor

Superconducting magnet coils are essential for steady-state or long-pulse operation of tokamaks. In an advanced tokamak, the central solenoid (CS) coils are usually divided into several pairs of modules to provide for an extra plasma shaping capability in addition to those available from the shaping (poloidal field) coils. In the conventional pancake winding scheme of superconducting coils, each coil consists of separate superconducting ‘double-pancake’ coils connected together in series; however, such joints are not superconducting, which is one of the major disadvantages, especially in pulsed operations. A new type of winding was adopted for the ITER CS coil, which consists of cylindrical shell ‘layers’ joined in series. A disadvantage of this layer winding is its inability to yield modular coils that can provide certain degree of plasma shaping. Joints can be removed in a coil winding pack with the conventional pancake winding scheme, if the conductor is sufficiently long and the winding machine is properly equipped. The compactness, however, cannot be preserved with this scheme. The winding compactness is important since the radial build of the CS coils is one of the major parameters that determine the machine size. In this paper, we present a continuous winding scheme that requires no joints, allows coil fabrication at minimum dimension, and meets the flux swing requirement and other practical aspects.