Study on reducing the impact to EAST cryogenic system caused by the failure of load devices

Abstract

Abstract EAST tokamak has complicated supercritical helium loops for cooling the superconducting magnets and other thermal loads. When failures occur in these load devices, such as magnet quench or vacuum failure, a large amount of helium evaporated in the cryogenic circuits returns to the cryogenic distribution system, which makes the pressures rise and the helium returning to the refrigerator increases. The refrigerator will run in a supercooling state and the turbine protection shutdown will be triggered with probability, which further affects the operation of the cryogenic system. This paper analyzes the archive data of this undesired phenomenon, the EAST cryogenic system model based on EcosimPro is used to simulate the dynamic process during the failure. A split-range control scheme to stabilize the pressures in the distribution system under failure state is proposed. the control module is developed in EcosimPro, simulation results show that it could achieve a satisfactory control performance and reduce the impact caused by the failure.