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Godzilla is helping ITER prepare for tokamak assembly
ITER employees stand by Godzilla, the most powerful commercially available industrial robot available. (Photo: ITER)
Many people are familiar with Godzilla as a giant reptilian monster that emerged from the sea off the coast of Japan, the product of radioactive contamination. These days, there is a new Godzilla, but it has a positive—and entirely fact-based—association with nuclear energy. This one has emerged inside the Tokamak Assembly Preparation Building of ITER in southern France.
Kazuyuki Takase, Kunugi Tomoaki, Masurou Ogawa, Yasushi Seki
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 125 | Number 2 | February 1997 | Pages 223-231
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE97-A24269
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As one of thermofluid safety studies in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, buoyancy-driven exchange flow behavior through breaches of a vacuum vessel (VV) has been investigated quantitatively by using a preliminary loss-of-vacuum-event (LOVA) apparatus that simulated the tokamak VV of a fusion reactor with a small-scaled model. To carry out the present experiments under the atmospheric pressure condition, helium gas and air were provided as the working fluids. The inside of the VV was initially filled with helium gas and the outside was atmosphere. The breaches on the VV under the LOVA condition were simulated by opening six simulated breaches to which were set the different positions on the VV. When the buoyancy-driven exchange flow through the breach occurred, helium gas went out from the inside of the VV through the breach to the outside and air flowed into the inside of the VV through the breach from the outside. The exchange rate in the VV between helium gas and air was calculated from the measured weight change of the VV with time since the experiment has started. Experimental parameters were breach position, breach number, breach length, breach size, and breach combination. The present study clarifies that the relation between the exchange rate and the breach position of the VV depended on the magnitude of the potential energy from the ground level to the breach position, and then, the exchange rate decreased as the breach length increased and as the breach size decreased.