KSTAR Assembly and Vacuum Commissioning for the 1 st Plasma

The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device site assembly was completed by May 2007. During the assembly period, several key technologies were developed to assemble the superconducting tokamak and its ancillary systems. As will be described in this paper, we encountered several problems and difficulties that mainly stemmed from the uniqueness of the superconducting tokamak, but all the problems were successfully solved and the assembly was satisfactorily completed on schedule. The vacuum commissioning was the first step of the integrated machine commissioning. Since the commissioning was strongly related to verifying the feasibilities of the KSTAR assembly strategies, the commissioning result was an important indication for quality assessment in the assembly. The commissioning results verified that the KSTAR assembly was successfully performed, and provided an essential condition to start the machine cool-down. In addition to the basic vacuum test, the vacuum commissioning included wall conditioning and a gas fueling test for the 1 st plasma. As a result, the wall conditioning and the fueling system adequately supported the 1 st plasma campaign.