Residual gas analysis of a cryostat vacuum chamber during the cool down of SST - 1 superconducting magnet field coil

One of the most important feature of Steady state Superconducting Tokamak -1 (SST-l) is the Nb-Ti superconducting magnet field coils. The coils will be kept in a high vacuum chamber (Cryostat) and liquid Helium will be flown through it to cool it down to its critical temperature of 4.5K. The coil along with its hydraulics has four types of joints (1) Stainless Steel (S.S.) to Copper (Cu) weld joints (2) S. S. to S. S. weld joints (3) Cu to Cu brazed joints and (4) G-10 to S. S. joints with Sti-cast as the binding material. The joints were leak tested with a Helium mass spectrometer leak detector in vacuum as well as in sniffer mode. However during the cool-down of the coil, these joints may develop leaks. This would deteriorate the vacuum inside the cryostat and coil cool-down would subsequently become more difficult. To study the effect of cooling on the vacuum condition of the Cryostat, a dummy Cryostat chamber was fabricated and a toroidal Field (TF) magnet was kept inside this chamber and cooled down to 4.5 K.A residual gas analyzer (RGA) was connected to the Cryostat chamber to study the behaviour of major gases inside this chamber with temperature. An analysis of the RGA data acquired during the coo-down has been presented in this chamber. (author)