Locating of normal transitions in a Bi2223 high temperature superconducting coil by non-contact voltage measurement method

Abstract

Locating of normal transitions in high temperature superconducting (HTS) coils is important for protection and safety design of HTS apparatus. A general method to locate the normal transitions is to measure resistive voltages along HTS windings by many voltage taps directly soldered to the HTS coils. However, electrical insulation characteristics of the HTS coils are deteriorated because it is necessary to remove electrical insulations of the HTS wires for the soldering. It is a serious problem especially for AC HTS coils to which high voltages are applied. Therefore the authors have presented a non-contact voltage measurement method that can detect the resistive voltages without removing the insulations by voltage dividing capacitors. So far the authors have verified the principle of the non-contact method. In this paper, a method to locate the normal transitions in a Bi2223 HTS coil based on the non-contact method is proposed. The proposed method can not only detect the normal transitions but also locate their positions. It is experimentally confirmed that the proposed method is useful for locating the normal transitions.