Simulations of Bending and Twisting Mechanical Characteristics of a Cable Strand Made of REBCO Conductors at Cryogenic Temperatures

High-temperature superconducting (HTS) materials, especially REBCO coated conductors (CCs), are promising for the application of high field magnets, current leads, and power devices. However, the current capacity is limited for a single CC. In recent years, several prototypes of cable, conductor, and strand were proposed and demonstrated in order to increase current capacity. Except for the high current capacity, the mechanical property is other one of the important factors in practical applications. This paper numerically analyzed the mechanical characteristics of a quasi-isotropic strand composed of four substrands by stacking ReBCO CCs in parallel, which mainly include dependencies of bending radii and twisting pitches on critical currents. The strain distributions of the strand in bending and twisting as well as combination of bending with twisting were calculated by the simulation method. The results are useful in application of high field and large-scale magnet and current lead in low temperature.