Manufacture of Inter-Coil Support-Elements of the W7-X Magnet System

The magnet system of W7-X consists of 50 non planar and 20 planar, super conducting coils. Each of these coils has to be fixed on the central-coil support-structure. This is a massive inner ring with extensions for attaching the coils. Additionally the coils have to support each other which is realized by special inter-coil support-elements (ICSE) (Damiani et al., 2005). These elements were designed to resist the high loads of maximum 1500 KN. In order to accelerate the "hand made", already qualified manufacture process of these ICSE an automatic production procedure was developed. This procedure starts with a laser scan measurement, followed by the evaluation of the measured data and the calculation of the dimension which is necessary for the manufacture and creating a design file including a drawing. The outcome is an iges-format file which will be sent directly to the milling/drilling machine.