Quench Analysis of MICE Spectrometer Superconducting Solenoid

MICE superconducting spectrometer solenoids fabrication and tests are in progress now. First tests of the Spectrometer Solenoid discovered some issues which could be related to the chosen passive quench protection system. Both solenoids do not have heaters and quench propagation relied on the “quench back” effect, cold diodes, and shunt resistors. The solenoids have very large inductances and stored energy which is 100% dissipated in the cold mass during a quench. This makes their protection a challenging task. The paper presents the quench analysis of these solenoids based on 3D FEA solution of coupled transient electromagnetic and thermal problems. The simulations used the Vector Fields QUENCH code. It is shown that in some quench scenarios, the quench propagation is relatively slow and some areas can be overheated. We describe ways of improving the solenoids' quench protection in order to reduce the risk of possible failure.