The Mechanical Structure of the WEST Ion Cyclotron Resonant Heating Launchers

The WEST ICRH system has to deal with two challenging issues that no other ICRH system before ITER has faced simultaneously so far, i.e. ELMs resilience and Continuous Wave (CW) RF operation. The technical solution chosen to meet the requests imposed by the WEST scenarios is to build three new launchers based on the RF structure successfully tested in short pulses in 2007 on Tore Supra prototype launcher. This paper gives an overview of the mechanical structure of the CW ELMs resilient WEST ICRH launchers. The technical solutions chosen to drive the mechanical design are presented, in regard of the past experience on the 2007 TS prototype, together with the significant work carried out on the mechanical design to improve the launcher structure. The thermal and electro-mechanical analyses conducted and their impact on the launcher design are also presented. These three new CW ELMs resilient ICRH launchers are foreseen to be installed on WEST in 2016, and operational for the first plasmas. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.