Transient stability of AC multi-strand superconducting cables

AC application, it is necessary to estimate the stability of multi-strand superconducting cable. Therefore, we have been studying the transient stability of non-insulated multi-strand cable when one strand in a cable turns into the normal state locally. In the quench process, local temperature rise produced by current redistribution among strands is not desirable for stability. In a previous work, we discussed the effect of Cu matrix allocated to each strand on the transient stability and showed that the Cu matrix allocation can improve the stability of non-insulated multi-strand cable through mainly numerical simulations. In this paper, we carried out experiments on three kinds of non-insulated three-strand cables; one consists of NbTi/CuNi strands and the others consist of NbTi/Cu/CuNi strands having different cross-sectional arrangement. These sample strands have almost the same diameter, the same matrix to superconductor ratio and the same B–J characteristics to evaluate the effect of Cu allocation quantitatively. We choose to define the transient stability in terms of the minimum quench energy (MQE) at each DC transport current. We also investigated the transient stability of sample cables when quench is initiated in two or three (all) strands simultaneously.