Preliminary design and evaluation of large‐diameter superconducting cable toward GW‐class hybrid energy transfer of electricity, liquefied natural gas, and liquefied nitrogen

Abstract

AbstractConsidering the temperature rises caused by the friction loss and heat leakage, long‐distance and high‐capacity transportation of liquefied natural gas (LNG) is currently not very feasible by using a cryogenic pipeline. As a fire‐proof and pollution‐free liquid, liquefied nitrogen (LN2) is introduced to cool the LNG pipe and high temperature superconducting (HTS) cable simultaneously for exploring a new hybrid energy transfer (HET) concept of the LNG, LN2, and electricity. In this new concept, both the LNG pipe and HTS cable are inserted into the same LN2 pipe, and these two coaxial assemblies are designed to have very large diameters for enhancing the energy transfer capacity. As case studies, two HTS cables rated at 2 kA and 10 kA are structurally optimized by using a particle swarm optimization method. Two performance indicators of required tape length and generated AC loss per meter cable are introduced to evaluate the capital cost and operating cost with thousands of optimized parameters. The results show that this new HET concept has significant potentials to avoid excessive LNG temperature rise and reduce the HTS tape and cooling costs, and thus lays some bases for the use in future power and energy transfer applications.