Thermal Stability of Conduction-Cooled YBCO Pancake Coil

When a high-temperature superconducting (HTS) coil is operated using a conduction-cooling technique, the coil should be impregnated with epoxy resin because the coil is not sufficiently cooled without it. On the other hand, it is important that the coil should have no damaged area in the winding because the damaged area would generate heat locally and the coil would eventually quench. However, whenever we fabricated an impregnated HTS coil wound with YBCO tapes and evaluated its V-I characteristics, the n-value of the coil was much lower than we expected, indicating that the critical currents of some areas in the winding drastically decreased. Therefore, we have started to improve the performance of an impregnated HTS coil wound with YBCO tapes. In this paper, we investigated the cause of the degradation and found that the degradation did not occur when we decreased the radial tensile stress in the windings. Then we fabricated four single-pancake coils, stacked them, and tested them in a conduction-cooled condition. The measured V-I curves were in good agreement with the calculated ones, suggesting that we successfully developed a technique of fabricating an impregnated HTS coil wound with YBCO tapes with no degradation. We also measured thermal runaway currents of a conduction-cooled HTS coil composed of two single-pancake coils wound with YBCO tapes and numerically simulated the thermal properties by using a three-dimensional heat conduction equation in order to study the thermal stability of the YBCO coil. The measured thermal runaway currents were in good agreement with the calculated ones.