Experimental Results of the HTS Floating Coil Using REBCO Tapes for the Mini-RT Upgrading

Abstract

The upgrading plan of the Mini-RT which is an experimental device for plasma physics was initiated to replace the magnetically-levitated high temperature superconducting (HTS) coil by the new one wound with the latest REBCO tapes. The performance of the new HTS coil has been examined at the National Institute for Fusion Science. The coil was indirectly cooled to 35 K by forced flow of cold helium gas. The coil was successfully excited up to 100 A with a proper persistent current switch (PCS) operation. The central field given by the Hall probe was 0.21 T, which was the same with that expected by a numerical calculation. The time constant of the current decay during the persistent current mode was evaluated at the coil temperature of 36 and 41 K to be 306 and 228 h, respectively. These values are consistent with the estimation based on the measured joint resistances and they are much longer than that of the previous floating coil of Mini-RT wound 10 years ago (41 h before aged deterioration). By the test results, it has been confirmed that the promising performance of the manufactured REBCO floating coil has been achieved to further promote the Mini-RT project.