The transport of the toroidal magnets
The featured photo in this post depicts one of the toroidal magnets that will ensure the confinement of the nuclear plasma inside the Tokamak reactor, the first nuclear fusion experiment within the international project called ITER.
A few years ago, precisely in 2017, we designed the transport structure for the magnets produced in Italy by ASG Superconductor on behalf of OMBA Engineering e Impianti; the magnets, once completed and tested inside the La Spezia plant, had to be transported by road to the port, to then be lifted and transported by ship to Marghera for the subsequent transformation operations before being installed in the heart of the Tokamak reactor in the plant ITER of Cadarache (France). For the multimodal transport of 10 toroidal magnets, Steel Project has designed a special metal support structure, which can be completely disassembled and reused, which could guarantee the high stiffness against deformation required by the transport specifications to guarantee the integrity of the superconducting properties of the toroidal coil.
The project went ahead and the progress has been shown in these days on the LinkedIn channel of “ITER Organization”, with several photos and a video which can be referred to here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LoV18YmWB_c
Further information on the structure built for transport can be found here https://www.steelproject.it/en/portfolio/transport-structure-of-the-toroidal-magnets-for-the-nuclear-fusion-project-iter/