Fabrication trials of a cable made of sub-cable assemblies for EDIPO 2 magnet
First Rutherford cable made of sub-cable assemblies ever fabricated at CERN!
By Angelo Bonasia and Jerome Fleiter
The European Dipole (EDIPO) test facility, for testing fusion superconducting cables under high background magnetic fields, has been operated for several years by the Swiss Plasma Center (SPC) at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Villigen, Switzerland.
EDIPO 2, a salient upgrade of EDIPO test bench with a nominal background field of up to 15 T and a large aperture of 144×144 mm2, is currently under design and construction [1]. The superconducting cable of EDIPO 2 magnet is composed of 24 sub-cable assemblies of (6+1) Nb3Sn strands (0.7 mm in diameter) each, and it is a flat and rectangular cable of ~3.5 mm thickness and ~23.9 mm width.
Following the request of SPC, TE-MSC-LSC performed cabling trials on the Rutherford cable machine of Building 103 at CERN, based on (6+1) sub-cable made of copper wires and supplied by SPC.
The cabling trials were successfully done in November 2024, and a dummy copper cable with the adequate dimensions and properties has been produced. A cable length of ~230 m has been shipped to SPC, and it is being used for insulation and winding trials.
It is worth mentioning that this was the first time that a cable made of sub-cable assemblies was manufactured in our laboratory.
[1] R. Guarino et al., “Progress in the design and manufacturing of the EDIPO 2 cryostat”, Cryogenics 131 (2023) 103648