Transient Simulations of an Air-Coil SFCL

Simulations of superconducting fault current limiters (SFCL) devices become more crucial in order to predict their behavior before installing them into power systems. There are different approaches for modeling SFCLs, whereas computational simulations provide a better understanding of the behavior of SFCL devices. This paper presents three different models to simulate an air-coil SFCL that differ from each other by considerations of heat exchanges. Simulation results were compared with short-circuit tests. The results show that a good agreement between simulations and tests can be found if the heat exchanges between the different layers of high-temperature superconducting tapes are considered. The development of equivalent resistance and the increase in temperature of the superconducting tapes were also obtained.