Effect of Tape's $I_{\rm c}$ Inhomogeneity and Strand Misalignment on the Transport Capacity of Roebel Cables

In calculations for predicting the performance of high-temperature superconducting (HTS) cables, uniform physical and geometrical properties of the tapes are usually assumed. However, commercially available coated conductor tapes present a certain nonuniformity of their transport capability-namely their critical current-along the length. In addition, when coated conductor strands are compactly assembled to form a Roebel cable, their arrangement is far from the ideal one. In this work, we calculate the influence of I
_c
nonuniformities and of nonperfect strand alignment on the critical current of Roebel cables made of an HTS-coated conductor tape. For this purpose, we perform a statistical analysis using a recently developed and freely available open-source code to calculate the critical current of Roebel cables. We find that, for the considered cases, the nonuniformity of the strands' I
_c
can have a significant impact on the final critical current of the cable, whereas the influence of the misalignment of the strands is rather low.