Challenge

ITER is one of the most ambitious energy projects in the world today. 35 nations are collaborating to build the world’s largest Tokamak, a magnetic fusion device designed to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale, sustainable and carbon-free, clean source of energy.

This engineering challenge involves extreme environments (hard vacuum, cryogenic to high temperature, huge electro-magnetic fields, gamma and neutron radiation) with large instrumentation necessities. It being experimental, everything is first of a kind and requires highly specialised materials, manufacturing and assembling processes, as well as precise measurement instrumentation.

Benefit to customer

HBK provided measurement solutions for several of ITER’s critical sub-systems, namely the superconducting magnets, vacuum vessel, compression rings and current lead. More recently, HBK has been contracted to provide temperature, strain, displacement and acceleration measurement systems to the cryostat, the largest stainless steel high-vacuum pressure chamber ever built, which provides the high vacuum, ultra-cool environment for the ITER vacuum vessel and the super-conducting magnets. HBK was selected because of its unique capability and expertise in delivering high performance measurement systems based on both optical and electrical technologies