Analysis of an HTS coil for large scale superconducting magnetic energy storage

It has been well known that a toroid is the inevitable shape for a high temperature superconducting (HTS) coil as a component of a large scale superconducting magnetic energy storage system (SMES) because it is the best option to minimize a magnetic field intensity applied perpendicularly to the HTS wires. Even though a perfect toroid coil does not have a perpendicular magnetic field, for a practical toroid coil composed of many HTS pancake coils, some type of perpendicular magnetic field cannot be avoided, which is a major cause of degradation of the HTS wires. In order to suggest an optimum design solution for an HTS SMES system, we need an accurate, fast, and effective calculation for the magnetic field, mechanical stresses, and stored energy. As a calculation method for these criteria, a numerical calculation such as an finite element method (FEM) has usually been adopted. However, a 3-dimensional FEM can involve complicated calculation and can be relatively time consuming, which leads to very inefficient iterations for an optimal design process. In this paper, we suggested an intuitive and effective way to determine the maximum magnetic field intensity in the HTS coil by using an analytic and statistical calculation method. We were able to achieve a remarkable reduction of the calculation time by using this method. The calculation results using this method for sample model coils were compared with those obtained by conventional numerical method to verify the accuracy and availability of this proposed method. After the successful substitution of this calculation method for the proposed design program, a similar method of determining the maximum mechanical stress in the HTS coil will also be studied as a future work.