Turning fusion power into a new source of energy for humanity: this is the raison d’être of ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), the largest nuclear fusion research project in the world. Its aim is to demonstrate that it is possible to build a thermonuclear power plant capable of producing energy in a safe, sustainable and environmentally friendly manner.
Since 2005, ITER’s members – China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States – have committed to a 35-year collaboration to build and operate the ITER experimental device.
Based in the south of France, ITER involves 35 nations collaborating to build the most advanced and largest tokamak magnetic confinement fusion experiment. When complete, it will be twice the size of the largest machines currently in operation, with ten times the plasma chamber volume, and demonstrate that fusion power can be generated on a commercial scale.
Countries around the world have committed to Net Zero emissions by 2050 as part of the UN Race to Zero campaign and recognize that they must decarbonize their energy sectors if they are to succeed. Global leaders are backing this initiative as nuclear fusion holds the potential of generating colossal amounts of power that is low carbon, safer and produces much smaller amounts of waste. Compared to the chemical reaction from burning coal, oil or gas, nuclear fusion releases nearly four million times more energy, and four times more than nuclear fission.
One of the world's greatest engineering feats
Thousands of people are working towards the project’s success, building millions of components, some of which weigh several hundred metric tons. Factories around the world ship them to France to be assembled into the giant reactor. It is one of the most complex engineering endeavors in history.
“Constructing the machine piece by piece will be like assembling a 3D puzzle on an intricate timeline,” said Bernard Bigot, director-general of ITER. “Every aspect of project management, systems engineering, risk management and logistics of the machine assembly must perform together with the precision of a Swiss watch.”
For such a project spanning decades, ITER needed an industry leading technology platform to help it orchestrate all the global participants; achieve scalable, multi-site, secure collaboration; define common design and engineering processes; effectively manage the technical configuration and ensure compliance with nuclear standards. It found the answer in Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
From the very beginning, ITER has used CATIA to design the tokamak. Since then, as part of its product lifecycle management (PLM) project, it has expanded the scope of applications it uses from Dassault Systèmes within the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to include ENOVIA for collaboration, DELMIA for process analysis and most recently EXALEAD for indexing and intuitively accessing data.
“We are managing a huge amount of data,” said Jean-Pierre Mailharrancin, configuration system coordinator and PLM project manager at ITER. “One of the major issues we faced before was that we were using many tools that weren’t accessible to all. We wanted to reduce their quantity and bring consistency to our organization. To do so, we needed to put in place a central database to bring together all stakeholders within ITER, store and access accurate data, and gain a single version of the truth. With the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, we can now connect everything together, so that all users access, share and gain insights from all the data.”
For Hans-Henrich Altfeld, head of the Project Control Office and sponsor of the PLM implementation project at ITER, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is helping the organization tackle the enormous complexity that comes with an operation of this scope and scale, and gain transparency of each project breakdown.
“This project is characterized by two dimensions – enormous complexity and a long duration,” Altfeld said. “This presents a number of challenges that include the knowhow generated as the project progresses, and allowing people who join the project later to dig into that information. Preserving our knowledge is critical.
“In terms of structural complexity, ITER is comparable to building the international space station, yet it has even more member complexity of this project, contending with the sheer number of people, components and suppliers involved but also the amount of changes that occur. In a first-of-a-kind project like ITER, there’s a lot of learning going on.”
To gain control, ITER is reducing complexity by breaking the project down into smaller parts and connecting them all via a continuous digital thread on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. By having a complete view of all data surrounding each component, ITER is able to ensure stringent quality control as the machine progresses through the assembly stage of the project.
To learn more about how ITER is using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to collaborate internationally, manage complexity and change, meet rigorous global standards and take control of the entire lifecycle of one of the greatest engineering feats to date:
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