Lubricant coating of dowel for the ITER vacuum vessel gravity support

The ITER vacuum vessel gravity supports located in the lower level shall sustain loads in radial, toroidal and vertical directions. The hinge type VVGS consists of two hinges, upper and lower blocks and dowels. In order to develop the design concept and verify the structural integrity of the hinge system, the design analysis has been performed in detail. Inclination of 15° for the hinge based supporting system was introduced to provide centering force to make stable equilibrium state of the vacuum vessel. Due to this inclination the hinges are rotated by the radial expansion of the VV during operation and baking, respectively. If a dowel is seized in the hinge, the supporting system can be highly stressed due to the restrained displacement in the seized dowel. Therefore, solid lubricant coatings were suggested on dowels in order to avoid seizing in the sliding area. In this work, several sets of coupons were made with different coating materials to investigate the effect according to the selection of coating material. Also, a test facility was designed to cover the ITER relevant loading and boundary conditions, e.g. vacuum condition, temperature, contact pressure, cycles, etc. From those test results, the optimized coating method was found to avoid seizure of dowel in the ITER VVGS.