Numerical Simulations of Superconducting Cables Bending and Winding

The assessment of the cold working, deformation, stress and strain distributions, and elastic spring back of superconducting cables conductors used for nuclear fusion experiments is a crucial issue for their manufacture process. The winding process of the ITER Toroidal Field (TF) conductors foresees their unbending from the drum they are delivered with and re-bending to their final shape. Nowadays the winding of the European Dipole (EDIPO) dummy coil is in progress and the final one will be challenging due to the conductors stiffness and the related spring back effect. In the light of this F4E ongoing activity and in view of the final design of the automatic winding process of the ITER TF coils a numerical tool capable to predict the plastic and elastic behavior of these conductors would be useful. To this end explicit Finite Element (FE) models have been implemented with the commercial code ANSYS/LS DYNA and simplified non linear calculations with CAST3M. Several numerical analyses have been performed by using different material properties, plasticity behaviors and loading conditions. The results of the analyses are presented and compared with experimental results and correlations with analytical solutions are investigated.