Thermal Runaway Characteristics of Bi2212 Coil for Conduction-Cooled SMES

In this paper, we investigated the thermal runaway characteristics of a conduction-cooled Bi2212 HTS coil with a 4 K-GM cryocooler system under compensating operation for load fluctuations. We measured the temporal evolutions of temperature and voltage distributions of the HTS solenoidal coil for typical current patterns of load fluctuation compensation at different ambient temperatures. On the basis of these experimental results, we constructed a thermal analysis model, and analysed the thermal runaway characteristics during and after the load fluctuation compensation. Based on the results of our experiments and the numerical simulations, we proposed criterion for the monitoring of an HTS SMES system during compensating operation for load fluctuations.