DeHoff gundrilling used to make world’s largest nuclear fusion reactor

The DeHoff 20144 is a custom-designed gundrilling machine used to make components for the world’s largest nuclear fusion reactor, the ITER Tokamak. Fusion reactors use extreme heat to fuse atoms together and create massive amounts of energy, while also not creating any radioactive waste nor any carbon dioxide or greenhouse gas emissions.

The DeHoff 20144 is used to perform gundrilling, pull boring, roller burnishing, and thread tapping on the aluminum microwave guides. The microwave guides are long tubes used to heat the plasma fluid inside the Tokamak vacuum chamber to 150 million degrees Celsius, which are the conditions needed for nuclear fusion.

The DeHoff 20144 has a gundrilling diameter capacity of 2 inches (50.8 mm) and a maximum drilling depth of 144 inches (3658 mm). It features custom workpiece fixturing and tooling to perform the gundrilling, pull boring, roller burnishing, and thread tapping operations all on a single machine. DeHoff gundrilling machines are designed and manufactured by Kays Engineering in Marshall, Missouri, USA.

Teledyne Brown Engineering, as the prime on a contract to supply US-ITER, based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has ordered the DeHoff 20144 to fabricate waveguides for the ITER reactor which will be located in Cadarache, France.

14/04/2023