GEATOP MONITORING ITER'S "THE BIG LIFT"

14 May, 2022

"THE BIG LIFT" as it is called is the first lifting that took place at the ITER construction site located in Cadarache - France of the first sector of the Vacuum Vessel (VV) that completes the first piece for the construction of an experimental reactor for nuclear fusion.

A highly complex handling that lasted more than a day and a half and allowed the first sector of the VV, with its 1,380 t, to arrive inside the Tokamak Pit.

We at GEATOP S.r.l., a company specialized in applied metrology and dimensional inspection and a partner of Ansaldo Nucleare, support the DYNAMIC group in the assembly of the Tokamak, and specifically for this important milestone we have teamed up with the ORYS company, working at the forefront of lifting and handling monitoring of this sector, using software and instrumentation up to the mark of this important achievement.

An extraordinary challenge for metrology in fact, thanks to the study carried out in the preliminary stage through virtual simulation, we were able to carry out the metrological control activity in the field through the use of more than 30 CatEyes and SMRs, detected simultaneously by three Leica Absolute Tracker AT960 LT #Hexagon Italy, obtaining a quality result in a short time.

Thanks to our know-how, we developed within the #SpatialAnalyzer measurement software a "bespoke software" that allowed us to drive the alignment to the final position of the sector, with a cycle time between measurement, analysis and displacement calculation, of less than 2 minutes.

The entire metrological control operation followed by the GEATOP group achieved a landing site positioning result below 0.1 mm and with a final Sector positioning error below ±0.5mm!

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