Modeling of electromagnetic and thermal diffusion in a large pure aluminum stabilized superconductor under quench

Abstract

Low temperature composite superconductors stabilized with extra large cross-section pure aluminum are currently in use for the Large Helical Device in Japan, modern big detectors such as ATLAS at CERN, and other large magnets. In these types of magnet systems, the rated average current density is not high and the peak field in a region of interest is about 2-4 T. Aluminum stabilized superconductors result in high stability margins and relatively long quench times. Appropriate quench analyses, both for longitudinal and transverse propagation, have to take into account a rather slow diffusion of current from the superconductor into the thick aluminum stabilizer. An exact approach to modeling of the current diffusion would be based on directly solving the Maxwell's equations in parallel with thermal diffusion and conduction relations. However, from a practical point of view, such an approach should be extremely time consuming due to obvious restrictions of computation capacity. At the same time, there exist certain ways that simplify mathematical models for the thermal and electromagnetic diffusion processes for the purpose of rapidly calculating the propagation velocity and effective simulating of quench behavior. These models explained here were tested and applied to quench simulation in the above-mentioned magnet systems.