Abstract
The base pressure of vacuum vessel of the KSTAR (Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research) Tokamak is to be a ultra high vacuum, $10^{-6}{\sim}10^{-7}Pa$, to produce clean plasma with low impurity containments. For this purpose, the KSTAR vacuum vessel and plasma facing components need to be baked up to at least $250^{\circ}C,\;350^{\circ}C$ respectively, within 24 hours by hot nitrogen gas from a separate baking/cooling line system to remove impurities from the plasma-material interaction surfaces before plasma operation. Here by applying the implicit numerical method to the heat balance equations of the system, overall temperature distributions of the KSTAR vacuum vessel and plasma facing components are obtained during the whole baking process. The model for 2-dimensional baking analysis are segmented into 9 imaginary sectors corresponding to each plasma facing component and has up-down symmetry. Under the resulting combined loads including dead weight, baking gas pressure, vacuum pressure and thermal loads, thermal stresses in the vacuum vessel during bakeout are calculated by using the ANSYS code. It is found that the vacuum vessel and its supports are structurally rigid based on the thermal stress analyses.
