Stability experiments on a long length of a cable-in-conduit conductor submitted to a rapidly changing magnetic field

This paper presents the results of a stability experiment performed on a Nb/sub 3/Sn cable-in-conduit conductor (/spl sim/23 meter long), cooled with a supercritical helium forced flow. In the test facility a pulsed superconducting coil has been integrated in the bore of the main background magnet. The energy input is so deposited over the whole length of the tested conductor thanks to the losses created by a fast discharge of the pulsed coil. The magnetization technique (using pick-up coils) enabled us to measure directly the losses during the stability experiment itself. The conductor has been found to support unexpectedly large field change rates, however, because of the saturation of the superconducting filaments by coupling currents, the energy deposited was actually limited to a rather low value.