AC loss measurements of Nb/sub 3/Sn wire carrying transport current

Abstract

The AC losses of internal-tin Nb/sub 3/Sn wires have been measured by an isothermal calorimetric method in triangular-wave fields at ramp rates of up to 1.2 T/s and in small-amplitude ripple fields biased with DC fields of up to 9 T. Measurements were made both with and without transport currents, which were both AC and DC. Without transport currents, losses had near-parabolic profiles when plotted against bias field with constant ripple amplitude, against triangular-wave ramp rate, or against triangular-wave ramp amplitude. With transport currents of up to 90% of critical, losses for triangular-wave field were shown to increase up to 17% with increasing DC currents and up to 10% with increasing AC currents. With DC transport currents, the scaling of loss by (1+i/sup 2/), where i is the ratio of transport current to critical current, may be a good approximation.