Thermal properties of a large-bore cryocooled 10 T superconducting magnet for a hybrid magnet

Abstract

A cryocooled 10T superconducting magnet with a 360mm room temperature bore has been developed for a hybrid magnet. The superconducting magnet cooled by four Gifford–McMahon cryocoolers has been designed to generate a magnetic field of 10 T. Since superconducting wires composed of coils were subjected to large hoop stress over 150MPa and Nb3Sn superconducting wires particularly showed a low mechanical strength due to those brittle property, Nb3Sn wires strengthened by NbTi-filaments were developed for the cryocooled superconducting magnet. We have already reported that the hybrid magnet could generate the resultant magnetic field of 27.5T by adding 8.5T from the superconducting magnet and 19T from a water-cooled Bitter resistive magnet, after the water-cooled resistive magnet was inserted into the 360mm room temperature bore of the cryocooled superconducting magnet. When the hybrid magnet generated the field of 27.5T, it achieved the high magnetic-force field (B×∂Bz/∂z) of 4500T2/m, which was useful for magneto-science in high fields such as materials levitation research. In this paper, we particularly focus on the cause that the cryocooled superconducting magnet was limited to generate the designed magnetic field of 10T in the hybrid magnet operation. As a result, it was found that there existed mainly two causes as the limitation of the magnetic field generation. One was a decrease of thermal conductive passes due to exfoliation from the coil bobbin of the cooling flange. The other was large AC loss due to both a thick Nb3Sn layer and its large diameter formed on Nb-barrier component in Nb3Sn wires.