Experimental Results of Screening-Current Field With 10-T Class Small REBCO Coil

Abstract

A REBCO-coated conductor has a tape shape and is suitable for forming a stack of single pancakes for generating a high magnetic field. However, the magnetic flux going through the tape surface causes a screening current, which reduces the magnetic field in conventional coil designs. Magnetic resonance imaging systems need high uniformity of the magnetic field, both spatially and temporally, and thus, the screening field resulting from the screening current is one of the critical issues. In this paper, a 10-T class small test coil using REBCO-coated conductors was fabricated and tested in a conduction-cooled configuration from 10 to 60 K for investigating the effect of the screening field on the generated magnetic field in the inner space of the coil. The coil was composed of a stack of 22 single pancakes using 4-mm-wide REBCO tapes with an inner diameter of 50 mm, an outer diameter of 129 mm, and a height of 104 mm. For different stacking orders based on the coil critical currents, the measured values of the central magnetic field at 10 K were 7.66 and 8.27 T, which were lower than the calculated values of 8.07 and 8.70 T obtained without taking account of the screening-current fields.