Mechanical Damage Protection Method by Reducing Induced Current in NI REBCO Pancake Coils During Quench Propagation

Abstract

The no-insulation (NI) winding technique has been attracting attention, because NI Rare-Earth Barium Copper Oxide (REBCO) pancake coils have high thermal stability. It is an indispensable technology to generate an ultra-high magnetic field. In 2017, using the NI winding technique a world-record high magnetic field, 45.5 T, was generated by 12 insert single pancake coils with an outsert magnet, and it showed a high potential to generate 14.4 T inside a background field of 31.1 T. After the experiment, the REBCO tapes were mechanically damaged, so that the critical currents were deteriorated. A large current was induced in NI REBCO coils next to the quenched coil when one of multi-stacked NI REBCO pancake coils quenched, resulting in tape property degradation and irreversible mechanical damage. Therefore, in order to protect NI REBCO pancake coils during quench, it is desired to reduce the amount of induced current. To suppress an induced current, the idea of “magnetic dam” has been proposed previously. The idea is to use a copper pipe installed at the outside of NI REBCO pancake coils. However, the copper pipe just slowed the quench propagation. In this paper, we extended the method to decrease an induced current much more by installing extra NI REBCO windings instead of the copper pipe. The electromagnetic and stress behaviors of 6-stacked NI REBCO coils with extra windings are simulated when one of the stacked NI REBCO coils transitions into a normal state. The ability of mechanical damage protection from a strong stress by an induced current during quench propagation is demonstrated through simulations.