Fast Charging and Thermal Stability Improvement of a Conduction Cooled HTS Coil Wound by Graphene Oxide Coated HTS Tape

The equivalent thermal conductivity of the conduction cooled high-temperature superconducting (HTS) coil is one among important design parameters. It is possible to rapidly rise the hot spot temperature of HTS coil in quench, because the normal propagation velocity of HTS wire is lower than 100 times one of low-temperature superconducting wire such as NbTi or Nb3Sn alloy, and the conduction cooled HTS coil is operated on vacuum adiabatic condition. Generally, polyimide tapes for electrical insulation are inserted between layers of HTS coil but initial cool-down time due to low equivalent thermal conductivity of HTS coil get longer and the thermal runaway current in quench is decreased. Recently, the researches on HTS coil without insulation to improve the equivalent thermal conductivity have been performed. However, because HTS coil without insulation are short-circuit, the charging time to reach the designed magnet flux density of HTS coil is too long. In this paper, turn to turn insulation of HTS coil wound by HTS tapes with graphene-oxide coated Cu stabilizer is presented. The graphene oxide has relatively high resistivity and can be coated with a thickness of less than 10 μm. To confirm the effect of the proposed method, two HTS coil samples that were insulated with polyimide tape and coated with graphene oxide were fabricated. Based on the results of thermal analysis and characteristics tests, the equivalent thermal conductivity, initial cool-down time, critical current, and thermal runaway current of HTS coils with different turn to turn insulation were compared.