A Leak Localisation Technique for ITER Water Cooling Circuits

A method to localise water leaks from the water cooling circuits into the ITER vacuum vessel has been demonstrated experimentally. The process involves adding a tracer material to the suspect cooling circuit and then looking for the tracer in the gases released after regenerating a torus cryopump at temperatures well above ambient. The detection technique used was gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and the method was demonstrated on the TIMO facility at the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, a half-scale model of the proposed ITER cryopumps.