The life test of a DC circuit breaker of tokamak device JT-60 for a nuclear fusion research

In the Tokamak devices for nuclear fusion research, the construction of the current transformer circuits having plasma as the secondary circuit and the change of the primary circuit current are necessary for generating current in the plasma. This is considered to be fairly difficult in practice if conventional methods using capacitor discharge and iron core coils are employed. Considering such circumstances, it was decided for JT-60 to use an air-core current transformer coil and to employ the method of storing energy in the form of current in the coil inductance instead of a capacitor. For this reason, a DC circuit breaker is required to interrupt coil current. The authors improved an AV vacuum breaker, which had been developed as the vacuum breaker of longitudinal magnetic field type applying a magnetic field in parallel with an arc, to get the one for DC circuit for the purpose of applying it to JT-60. In this paper, the operational characteristic of the DC breaker is described, the construction and function of the life test circuit is explained, and the test results are reported. Finally, interruptions of 10,000 times at 20 kA were carried out. It is successful that the restrike of arc occurring during tens of milli-seconds after interruptions was improved to 0.05% or less for 10,000 times operations. Further, it was found that the generation of arc restrike can be reduced practically to zero with two breakers in series. (Wakatsuki, Y.)