ARIES-AT Maintenance System Definition and Analysis.docVIP

Design Approach of the ARIES-AT Power Core By Lester M. Waganer1, Farrokh Najmabadi2, Mark Tillack2, and Xueren Wang2 (1) The Boeing Company, St. Louis, MO (2) University of California - San Diego, San Diego, CA and The ARIES Team Abstract The complexity of fusion power plant requires the integration of many diverse and important system requirements to achieve a design approach that would be viewed as a viable commercial electrical generating plant. The ARIES-AT power core design builds upon a history of fusion power core designs that have evolved along with physics and engineering advances. The baseline design point is optimized for maximum performance and minimum capital cost based upon the ARIES Systems Code results and physics and engineering analyses. To achieve high availability, ARIES-AT power core was designed to be quickly and easily maintainable. Power Core Design Philosophy In recent years, improved physics understanding of advanced plasma confinement modes have lead to more efficient power core configurations. The ARIES-RS1 design reflected many of these improvements, but the ARIES-AT2 incorporates several new plasma and engineering improvements. L. Waganer conducted an analysis that concluded the power core maintenance approach3 that extracted a complete power core sector and replaced it with a refurbished one from the plant hot cell was the most reliable and expedient core maintenance approach. This design approach was also used in the ARIES-RS power core design4. Extracting a complete power core sector requires placement of the poloidal field (PF) coils in regions above and below the horizontal location of the removable power core sector components. Additionally, all other systems, such as the vacuum pumping ports and RF or neutral beam systems, must be moved away from this region. Moreover, the toroidal field (TF) coils must be enlarged to provide adequate clearance between the coils to extract a complete power core sector. In deviating fr