TNS quarterly progress report, October--December 1976

The TNS effort during the October-November-December, 1976 period was primarily focused on the development of information to support a toroidal field coil technology and plasma size decision. Our plan calls for the development of systematic study ground rules, development of system, subsystem and component physical and cost models, development of selection criteria and finally, the evaluation of specific quantifiable and nonquantifiable factors to arrive at the selection of a reference TNS configuration. During the past quarter ground rules were established for the modeling of TNS systems and calculational model development initiated to generate quantitative information concerning the size and cost of selected machines in the TNS design space. Four parallel TNS design options have been defined for the trade studies, involving water-cooled copper, superconducting NbTi, superconducting Nb/sub 3/Sn, and hybrid copper/NbTi TF coil machine versions. The effort associated with the development of the design concepts and models of the four TNS approaches is described in this report, along with some preliminary trade study results and conclusions. It should be noted that this work is on-going and the models and ground rules are subject to continuous review and modification.