ITER Control Centre Design
ITER
background
Currently under construction in the South of France, the ITER project aims to demonstrate that fusion is the power source of the future. During its operation, the ITER facility will test key technologies to deliver a future commercial power plant using fusion.
The ITER project was born over 23 years ago but moved significantly forward to reality with the signing of the ITER agreement in 2006. This brought together the seven ITER members to develop the site at Cadarache for the construction of the plant. The ITER members are the European Union, the United States of America, China, Japan, Korea, India and Russia.
Site preparation began in France in 2007. Plans for the start of construction are currently in development with the detailed design of the vast number of buildings being progressed. At the core of the site will be the Tokamak building where the fusion reaction will take place and goes into operation in 2018.
project
A key building for the operation of the ITER facility will be the control room. From this location all the plant on site will be monitored and operated. Working alongside the operational team will be the experimental team. As ITER is an experimental facility its operation will be to deliver the complex physics experimental programme. Therefore it is critical that the control room building works to bring these two teams together in a collaborative environment.
The control room will also be the window to the ITER operation for the world. The Tokamak itself will be sealed for safety reasons and all collaborators and visitors will see of the fusion process will be from the control room. Therefore it has a critical role to play in the public relations aspect of the project.
CCD, with its track record in control room design and having worked in experimental projects such as CERN, was commissioned to provide the conceptual interior design for the control room building. This included the layout of the internal spaces of the building, the wayfinding through the building, the design of the interior look and feel and lighting & daylighting design. As with all our work, the design was developed from a having gained a detailed understanding of how the control room and the associated spaces would be operated.
implementation
We began by working with ITER staff to capture the design requirements. These were built around developing an operational concept for how the facility would work. This covered the critical elements of experimental & operational collaboration, the remote involvement of others in the experimental process, how future technology might be used to present data to the control room staff, how visitors would be managed, how the local offices related to the operational areas, etc. Because of the long time scales for implementation, the process to develop the requirements had to be very iterative and interactive with the ITER project team.
With the requirements captured and agreed with the project, we were able to progress with the design. The design work focused on 3 areas:
- The building structures: adopting a design developed by others, we looked at the roof profile and impact on the control room space and ceiling; we added glazing to provide daylight and visual impact to the control room; we modified the basement area and vertical circulation spaces to improve the flow of people.
- The interior: we developed detailed proposals for a feature ceiling in the control room, an outline lighting design for the control room, designs for external and interior glazing, specifications of finishes for acoustic performance appropriate for a 24/7 control room and how display technology would be used in the room. Given the project is developing new energy, we also made a number of design proposals aimed at improving the environmental performance of the building.
- Control room design - we made design proposals for an outline design of control room furniture and provided a number of layout options for the control room.
Of critical importance was to provide the conceptual design with an audit trail and design rationale and to highlight issues to be addressed at the project moves into detailed design.
outcomes
The conceptual design developed by CCD has been adopted by the project to be taken on by the building architects in the detailed design phase.
We have provided a design that can deliver the operational requirements as well as providing a flagship statement for the project. During the programme, we successfully overcame many of the operational challenges of designing for a research facility and one that won't be operating for another 9 years. We were also able to develop the design to provide a better working environment for the staff through better layout and modifying elements such as the provision of daylight.