Thermal stability of YBCO coated conductor with different Cu stabilizer thickness

The studies on the conduction-cooled superconducting magnets are actively underway with rapid advancement in refrigeration technology recently. YBCO coated conductor (CC) is one of the promising conductors for a conduction-cooled superconducting magnet because of increasing the operation temperature of magnets and being able to have cost collectiveness with conventional copper conductor in the future. However, it is known that quench propagation velocity in high-temperature superconductor (HTS) is two or three orders of magnitude slower than that in low-temperature superconductor because of its large heat capacity and the high operating temperature. The hot spot will emerge in local region if a critical current is non-uniform along the length of HTS tape and eventually, it causes permanent destroy for the whole HTS tape. Based on the protection of YBCO CC, it is necessary to determine a suitable stabilizer thickness for YBCO CC so that the temperature of hot spot in local area does not exceed the permissible temperature. In this study, we have established a suitable thermal analysis model, and analyzed minimum quench energy and thermal properties for three kinds of YBCO CC samples with different stabilizer thickness, which are fabricated by Superpower Incorporated, using finite element method. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.