Water ice-cooled MgB2 coil made by wind and react process

Abstract

A wind and react (W&R) coil of inner diameter 53 mm has been made from multi-core MgB2/Nb/CuNi wire manufactured by the internal magnesium diffusion (IMD) process. The W&R coil is wound from non-insulated rectangular wire of 1 mm2 with only 5 µm thick stainless steel foil used for interlayer insulation. The transport current performance of the coil and short wire samples was measured in a liquid He bath at external magnetic fields of 4.5–8.5 T and also in self-field conditions in sub-cooled water ice at temperatures between 33 K and 38 K. The presented MgB2 coil exhibits stable behavior at water ice cooling, and its high space factor allows a high current density of winding in comparison to the data from the already published MgB2 coils. The presented results demonstrate that MgB2 windings can be used safely in He-free conditions inside sub-cooled water ice, and this technique can be further optimized and used for future MgB2 coils.