Validated design of the ITER main vacuum pumping systems

Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe is developing the ITER high vacuum cryogenic pumping systems (torus, cryostat, NBI) as well as the corresponding mechanical roughing pump trains. All force-cooled big cryopumps incorporate similar design of charcoal coated cryopanels cooled to 5 K with supercritical helium. A model of the torus exhaust cryopump was comprehensively characterised in the TIMO testbed at Forschungszentrum. This paper discusses the vacuum performance results of the model pump and outlines how these data were incorporated in a sound design of the whole ITER torus exhaust pumping system. To do this, the dedicated software package ITERVAC was developed which is able to describe gas flow in viscous, transitional and molecular flow regimes as needed for the gas coming through the divertor slots and along the pump ducts into the cryopumps. The entrance section between the divertor cassettes and each pumping duct was identified to be the bottleneck of the gas flow. The interrelation of achievable throughputs as a function of the divertor pressure and the cryopump pumping speed is discussed. The system design is completed by assessment of the NBI cryopump system and integrating performance curves for the roughing pump trains needed during the regeneration phases of the cryopumps.