Design and setup of a testing device to investigate a reduced sized attachment system mock up for the ITER EU HCPB-TBM under different mechanical loading conditions

•A measurement system is developed to measure the electro-magnetic forces acting on the ITER EU HCPB TBM during operation.•A system based on the measurement of strain signals in combination with two force reconstruction methods is proposed.•Two mock ups have been designed to test and calibrate the measurement system.•A suitable testing device has been built to test the measuring system.•First results with simulated strain data are presented.

In order to determine the forces acting on the EU-Helium Cooled Pebble Bed Test Blanket Module (HCPB-TBM) during operation, a measurement system is developed. Therefore, two force reconstruction (FR) methods using measured strain signals are selected that are suitable for the application to the TBM. The first one, the augmented Kalman filter is a combined deterministic-stochastic approach. A second FR method based on the concept of a model predictive controller is proposed in this paper, which uses an optimization algorithm. In order to test the selected methods a testing device has been built which can be used to apply different force excitations on a reduced sized TBM mock up and measure the resulting strain signals of 16 strain gages. A simple tube mock up has been designed and manufactured to test and calibrate the FR algorithms. In addition, a second TBM mock up with attachment system is described. Finally, first results of the FR of a worst-case test case from simulated strain data of the simple tube mock up are presented.