Kinematic Simulation of Divertor Remote Handling Equipment for DTT

The divertor remote handling (RH) of the upcoming Italian tokamak Divertor Tokamak Test (DTT) is designed to be carried out by two tele-operated robots: the cassette multifunctional mover (CMM) and the cassette toroidal mover (CTM). The CMM is designed to place/remove the divertor cassettes which are near the RH ports into/from the vessel; the CTM is, instead, designed to move the cassettes which are distant from an RH port inside the vessel toroidally. To date, CMM is under a more advanced development stage of design with respect to CTM. This article describes and illustrates in detail the virtual kinematic simulations of the CMM operative procedures. With regard to the CTM, only preliminary simulations are presented. These activities are part of the integration and verification stages of the CMM design process, carried out in a Systems Engineering approach and following the workflow prescribed by the V-model and its requirements, functions, logical, and physical architecture (RFLP) paradigm. Therefore, after an introduction to the CMM requirements, functions, and conceptual design, which have already been developed, the article focuses on the description of its virtual kinematic simulations and the analysis of their results, with the aim of verifying the feasibility of the handling procedures and the correct integration of the CMM in the surrounding environment, considering all the in-vessel geometric constraints. The simulations have been carried out following a forward-kinematics approach. Therefore, each simulation has been divided into a series of consecutive activities, assigning each of them a set of values for the five CMM joints able to reach the required final position of the end-effector. The software DELMIA, part of the Dassault Systèmes V5 platform which also includes the software for CAD modeling CATIA V5, has been used to perform the simulations. As for the CTM operation, since its concept design has not been completed yet, preliminary virtual kinematic simulations have been performed with a different goal: to evaluate alternative possible operative strategies, which can impact the device design.