Effect of thermal contact between winding pack and casing on thermal behavior of SST-1 TF coil

Active cooling of the casing, which houses the winding pack of the large size superconducting magnet used for magnetic confinement of plasma under a steady state configuration, has been one of the points for debate. Toroidal field (TF) coils of SST-1 consists of six double pancakes of Nb–Ti based cable-in-conduit conductor (CICC), duly impregnated and encased in a tight fit stainless steel casing. In order to validate the cooling configuration of the SST-1 TF magnet system, an experiment has been done on one of the full scale TF coil without having cooling channels for the casing. The experimental results show a distributed temperature profile on the casing ranging from the lowest temperature of 17 K to the highest temperature of 29 K. The data obtained has been analyzed on the basis of thermal contact and thermal resistance. The paper will describe the experimental setup, thermo-hydraulic behavior of the CICC in winding condition and the comparison of experimental results with an empirical analysis.