Study on performance improvements of a high-temperature superconducting coil with a lattice-shape cross section

For designing inexpensive high-temperature superconducting (HTS) coils, it is essential to obtain large magnetic fields and stored energy with shorter lengths of HTS tape. To improve the performance of a coil, it is necessary to improve its transport-current performance. The critical current and n-value of an HTS tape were measured at various magnetic field magnitudes and angles at 77 K. The HTS tape employed in the coil was Bi-2223/Ag tape. From this measured data, fitting equations of the critical current and n-values were obtained. With these fitting equations, coil critical currents were analyzed according to our analytical model. The analysis showed that relatively large electric fields are generated at coil edges, inhibiting improvement of the transport-current performance of the coil. To solve this problem, we propose an HTS coil, which is produced by cutting and displacing the central portion of the rectangular cross section. By this rearrangement, the magnetic field distribution changes, resulting in an improvement in the coil critical current. We calculated performances of the proposed coil by varying the magnitude of displaced coils while maintaining a constant total HTS tape length. We found that there is an optimum cross section shape of the proposed coil, which provides improvements in the stored energy and the central magnetic field. In particular, the stored energy improves by approximately 43% compared with a rectangular cross section coil employing the same HTS tape length.