Stability and quench development study in small HTSC magnet Original Research Article

Stability and quench development in a HTSC magnet have been experimentally studied with the transport current in the magnet being below or above the “thermal quench current” level. The magnet was tested at both cryocooler cooling and liquid nitrogen cooling, with and without background magnetic field (up to 4 T). The temperature and electrical voltages in different sections of the magnet were measured using 20 thermocouples and 24 potential taps embedded in the winding. In this paper, the experimental procedure and the results are described. The results are compared with those obtained earlier in the experiments with the smaller HTSC specimens and are analysed by using the scaling theory of the thermal quench.