Feasibility study on the inductive fault current limiting cable

Fault current limiting (FCL) cable is a kind of superconducting cable which has a function of limiting the fault current at the fault of power grid. The superconducting cable detours the fault current through its stabilizer to keep the temperature as low as possible. On the other hands, the FCL cable permits the temperature rise within some acceptable limit and the fault current is limited by the consequent increase of the resistance of superconducting cable. This kind of FCL cable is called 'resistive FCL cable' because it uses resistive impedance to limit the fault current. In this paper, we suggest a novel concept of FCL cable, which is named as 'inductive FCL cable'. The inductive FCL cable is similar as the magnetic shielding fault current limiter in its operating mechanism. The magnetic field of superconducting cable is almost perfectly shielded by the induced current at the shielding layer during its normal operation. However, at the fault condition, quench occurs at the shielding layer by the induced current higher than its critical current and the magnetic field is spread out of the shielding layer. It will induce additional inductive impedance to the superconducting cable and the inductive impedance can be increased more by installing some material with high magnetic susceptibility around the superconducting cable. We examined the feasibility of inductive FCL cable with simple elemental experiments. The current limiting performance of inductive FCL cable was estimated considering an arbitrary power grid and its fault condition.