A Comparison Study of Heat Loss Characteristics in Monofilament and Multifilament Superconducting Coils Driven with AC Currents

Since superconducting wires have no resistance, electromagnets based on the superconducting wires produce no resistive heating with DC current as long as the current does not exceed the critical current of the wire. However, unlike resistive wires, superconducting wires exhibit AC heat loss. Embedding fine superconducting filaments inside copper matrix can reduce this AC loss to an acceptable level and opens the way to AC-capable superconducting coils. Here, we introduce an easy and accurate method to measure AC heat loss from sample superconducting coils by measuring changes in the rate of gas helium outflow from the liquid helium dewar in which the sample coil is placed. This method provides accurate information on total heat loss of a superconducting coil without any size limit, as long as the coil can fit inside the liquid helium dewar. With this method, we have evaluated AC heat loss of two superconducting solenoids, a 180-turn solid NbTi wire with 0.127 mm diameter (NbTi coil) and a 100-turn filamented wire with 1.4 mm diameter where 7 NbTi filaments were embedded in a copper matrix with copper to NbTi ratio of 6.7:1 (NbTi-Cu coil). Both coils were wound on 15 mm-diameter G-10 epoxy tubes. The AC heat losses of the NbTi and NbTi-Cu coils were evaluated as $53{\pm}4.7\;{\mu}W/A^2Hzcm^3$ and $0.67{\pm}0.16\;{\mu}W/A^2Hzcm^3$, respectively.

단일필라멘트와 다중필라멘트 초전도 코일의 교류 전류에 의한 발열 특성 비교 평가