Variation of Residual Welding Stresses in Incoloy 908 Conduit during the Jacketing of Superconducting Cables

The conduit fer superconducting cable is welded and plastically deformed during the jacketing process to make the CICC (Cable-in-Conduit-Conductors) fer a fusion magnet. The jacketing process of KSTAR (Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research) conductors is composed of several sequential steps such as rounding, welding, sizing, and square-rolling. Since the welded zone in Incoloy 908 conduit is brittle and easy to have flaws, there may be a possibility of stress corrosion cracking during the heat treatment of coil when both the induced tensile residual stress and the concentration of oxygen in the furnace are sufficiently high. The steps of the jacketing process were simulated using the finite element method of the commercial ABAQUS code, and the stress distribution in the conduit in each step was calculated, respectively. Furthermore, the variations of residual welding stresses through the steps of the jacketing process were calculated and analyzed to anticipate the possibility of the stress corrosion cracking in the conduit. The concentrated high tensile residual welding stresses along the welding bead decrease by the plastic deformation of the following sizing step. The distribution in residual stresses in the conductor for magnet coil is mainly governed by the last step of square-rolling.