Fabrication and test of a superconducting coil for SMES systems

To develop a stable and compact small-sized superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) coil, which provides electric power with high quality to sensitive electric loads, we fabricated a SMES coil and tested it. Because such a large-sized superconducting coil quenches far away from its critical current, the recovery current is frequently used as a stability criterion in the coil fabrication. Therefore, we first investigated the recovery current characteristics of the large current conductor, which was used in our SMES coil fabrication. The test results indicate that the recovery currents measured in the conductor are nearly identical to those based on the single wire. This implies that the recovery current is affected by the conductor´s cooling condition rather than its size and current capacity. In the SMES coil test the first quench occurred at 1250 A, which is equivalent to the stored energy of about 2 MJ. It corresponds to the quench current density of about 130 A/mm². This value is much higher in comparison with that reported in the other work. In addition, the first quench current of the coil agrees well with the measured recovery current of the conductor having similar cooling condition with it. This means that to determine the recovery current of a conductor is, first of all, important in the design and fabrication of a large-sized superconducting coil.