This paper presents a study on design of AC high temperature superconducting (HTS) magnet and its thermal stability. To realize fast variation of high magnetic field for magnetic refrigerator, AC operation is required. Generally, a permanent magnet or...
This paper presents a study on design of AC high temperature superconducting (HTS) magnet and its thermal stability. To realize fast variation of high magnetic field for magnetic refrigerator, AC operation is required. Generally, a permanent magnet or superconducting magnet is used to make magnetic field for magnetic refrigerator. Compared with the permanent magnet and the HTS magnet, the HTS magnet has advantage of high magnetic field and the magnetic field can be easily changed by controlling the transport current. Considering the design requirement of the magnetic refrigerator for a hydrogen re-liquefaction system, it requires 2.6 T and 3 T for different magnetic refrigerants and it can be achieved by stacking the different double pancake coils (DPCs).
Thermal stability is very important point to prevent HTS magnet's damage from a quench. Generally, the quench can be easily generated by other problems, like AC loss, increase temperature and over current at an extremely low temperature. Also AC operation generates AC loss, which is composed by eddy current loss and hysteresis loss and AC loss changes heat loss. Thus to make sure of thermal stability, several verification method should be tested in liquid nitrogen and 20 K temperature using a conduction cooling test apparatus.
In this paper, the HTS magnet is designed and fabricated to generate 3 T with 1 T/s and it has 25.4 mm inner diameter’s bobbin with aluminum. HTS layer of 4.2 mm width is used about 1.2 km for winding each DPC. The HTS magnet is composed of 12 DPCs and each DPC has different size to generate the required field distribution. AC loss and eddy current loss are generated at the HTS conductor and the magnet bobbin by the alternating magnetic field and the transport current. Therefore, the bobbin structures should have several slits to reduce eddy current loss. All DPCs are tested its performance in liquid nitrogen. After that, the HTS magnet which is stacked 12 DPCs is tested to check critical current and distribution of temperature by charge and discharge of operating current related with ramping rate in a conduction cooling test apparatus with two stage Gifford McMahon (GM) cryocooler.