Numerical Study of the Thermal Stability of YBa2Cu3O7- δ Tapes Suffering Lightning Current

In this paper, we presented a numerical model that took into account both the thermal and the electromagnetic aspects to study the thermal stability of YBa
₂
Cu
₃
O
_7-δ
(YBCO) tapes suffering lightning current (LC). The electromagnetic and thermal equations have been implemented in finite-element method software in order to obtain a novel homogenization model. The validity of this model was verified by experiment. Based on the model, the distributions of the current and temperature in different layers were presented. The influence of the dimension and material type of different layers on the thermal stability was investigated in detail. The calculated results showed that increasing the width of a YBCO tape and the thicknesses of the encapsulation layer could decrease the maximum temperature. Moreover, the encapsulation layer made of copper is a more desired choice than that made of stainless steel to improve the thermal stability.