Quench Propagation of YBCO Tapes of DC Superconducting Fault Current Limiter

Abstract

A DC resistive type Superconducting Fault Current Limiter (SFCL) can greatly reduce the fault current and protect the power equipment in DC systems. In the normal state, the superconducting tapes of SFCL will be in superconducting state. However, it may be quenched when a thermal disturbance energy impacts to it. Then the tapes will quench and sometimes even break when its temperature is too high. The objective of this paper is to obtain the quench propagation and recovery properties of DC resistive type SFCL when the superconducting tapes are affected by thermal disturbance. A numerical analysis method was proposed to investigate the quench propagation and recovery characteristics of the YBCO tapes based on thermal conduction theory. N-Value model was chosen to analyze the E-J characteristics of YBCO tapes. Numerical analysis results show that the normal zone propagation velocity of the tape was around 1 cm/s when transport current through the tape was 64 A. When the transport current was 64 A, the tape could not recover after a thermal disturbance of 4500 W/m applied for 100 ms. The quench and temperature propagation characteristics can be used to design the superconducting tapes of DC resistive type SFCL.