Numerical Study on Quench Process in Multi-Sectioned Adiabatic Superconducting Electromagnetic Iron Separator

A two-dimensional quench simulation model was developed for the Superconducting Electromagnetic Iron Separator (SEIS) system, which is designed to separate small pieces of ferromagnetic materials, such as detonators, from coal to achieve high purity and good yield. The SEIS coil adopted passive quench protection system with four-sectioned arrangement, each shunted with four diodes. The aluminum slices, with 99.99% purity and 0.5 mm × 12 mm cross section dimension, working as quench propagator, were clothed on the inner and the outer surfaces of the coil. The minimum quench energy, the temporal variations of current, voltage and hot spot temperature rise of the coil were analysed. Furthermore, the coil stress during winding, cool-down, charging and quench process was also included in this paper. The simulation results demonstrated that the existing protection system could guarantee the SEIS magnet experience no fatal damage during quench.