Structural design and manufacturing of TPE-RX vacuum vessel

TPE-RX is a newly constructed, large-sized reversed field pinch (RFP) machine installed at the Electrotechnical Laboratory of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry in Japan. This is the third largest RFP in the world. Major and minor radii of the plasma are 1.72 and 0.45 m, respectively. TPE-RX aims to optimize plasma confinement up to 1 MA. RFP plasma configuration was successfully obtained in March 1998. This paper reports the structural design and manufacturing of the vacuum vessel of TPE-RX. The supporting system on the bellows sections of the vessel was designed based on a detailed finite element method. The integrity of the vacuum vessel against a plasma disruption has been confirmed using dynamic inelastic analyses.