Effect of thermal on cable insulation breakdown

As for the Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility in Lan zhou (HIRFL), cables are one of the important media for transmitting signals. The power supply provides the excitation current for the magnet through the cable, and the current magnitude output from the power supply determines the quality of the beam flux. The heat will be generated when the current passes through the cable, if the cable skin temperature exceeds the maximum operating temperature, the cable will suffer a thermal breakdown of the insulation. The paper takes the quadrupole power supply cable as an example and establishes finite element software to analyse the temperature distribution of the cable at different currents. The simulation results show that when the current reaches 190A, the lowest temperature reaches the present cable surface’s tolerable temperature; the higher the current, the greater the temperature difference of the cable. Finally, an optimal selection of cables is proposed. This study provides data support for the generic cabling of the accelerator.