Critical Current Degradation Analysis in HTS Pancake Coil due to Self Field Effects

Since the discovery of high Tc superconductors, great efforts have been focused to develop high performance HTS magnets for the ultimate applications to power system devices. Magnet designers, however, have had difficulties in the estimation of the maximum operating current of the designed magnet from the tested short sample data, due to the degradation of the critical current density in the magnet. Similar story applies to the HTS electrical bus bar. It has been found that the critical current of Bi-2223 stacked tapes is much less than the total summation of critical currents of each tape, which is mainly attributed to the self magnetic fields. Furthermore, since the critical current degradation of Bi-2223 tape is greater in the normal magnetic field (to the tape surface) than in the parallel one, detailed magnetic field configurations are required to reduce the self field effects. In this paper, we calculate the self field effects of a stacked conductor, defining self field factors of normal and parallel magnetic fields to the tape surface. Finally, the critical current degradations in the HTS magnet are explained by the introduced self field factors of the stacked conductor.