Status of SST-1 Refurbishment

Steady State Tokamak (SST-1) refurbishment at the Institute for Plasma Research has been recognized and accepted as a Mission activity since Jan 2009 with an ultimate objective of producing the first plasma by the end of 2011. Under the SST-1 Mission mandate, several refurbishment activities have been initiated and pursued vigorously on various sub-systems of SST-1. Developing reliable designs and processes leading to fabrication of leak tight low DC resistance joints, fabrication of bubble type supercritical cooled 80K shields, reliable electrical and thermal isolations amongst various subsystems of SST-1, modular testing of SST-1 machine shell in simulated scenarios, augmentation and reliability establishment in SST-1 vacuum vessel baking system, time synchronization amongst various heterogeneous subsystems of SST-1 etc, are few of the major activities being undertaken. SST-1 machine shell reassembly would begin by December 2009. During SST-1 refurbishment, all TF magnets equipped with sub n-Ω leak tight joints would be cold tested at nominal currents, all the repaired vessel sectors having baking channels would be tested in simulated scenarios, all the 80K thermal shield and 5K TF case shield sectors would be pre-assembly tested apart from some cryogenic lay-outs modification and GPS based time synchronization amongst heterogeneous sub-systems.