Abstract
The historic story of the superconducting (SC) magnet for MHD ETL Mark V Facility (cf. Fig. 1) is presented. This SC magnet was developed in the MHD Project (1966-75), which was one of the first MITI/AIST Large-Scale R & D Projects and the first national project for superconductor applications in Japan. This SC magnet had been the largest in Japan through 1982 when the Japanese LCT coil was made by JAERI. It was completed in 1973 after many difficulties, some fatal and some trivial, because of a lack of knowledge, before it could generate maximum magnetic field 7T with stored energy 65MJ. Because technological problems had piled up and because no management know-how of national projects on technology development had been accumulated before then in the forefront of worldwide technological advances, “step by step” advances and “trial and error” attempts in the progress of the project had to be done over again. The paper is divided into three parts. Part I describes the process of determining the specifications of the magnet and the conductor tests before the magnet was manufactured.
