Quench behavior of high-temperature superconductor (RE)Ba2Cu3Ox CORC cable

The high-temperature superconductor (HTS) (RE)Ba ₂Cu ₃O _x (REBCO) conductor on round core (CORC) cable has great advantages with its high current capacity and power density. In REBCO CORC cables, current is redistributed among tapes through terminal contact resistance (TCR) when a local quench occurs. Therefore, its quench behavior is different from the single tape situation. To better understand the underlying physical process of local quenches in CORC cables, a new 3D multi-physics modeling tool for CORC cables is developed and presented in this paper. In this model, the REBCO tape is treated as a thin shell without thickness, and four models are coupled: a T-formulation model, an A-formulation model, a heat transfer model, and an equivalent circuit model. The T-formulation model is applied to the conductor shell only to calculate current distribution, which will be input into the A-formulation model; the A-formulation model is applied to the whole 3D domain to calculate the magnetic field, which is then fed back to the T-formulation model. The hot spot-induced quenches of CORC cables are analyzed. The results show that the thermal stability of the CORC cable can be considerably improved by reducing the TCR. The minimum quench energy (MQE) increases rapidly with the reduction of TCR when the resistance is in a middle range, which is about in this study. When the TCR is too low () or too high (), the MQE shows no obvious variation with TCR. With a low TCR, a hot spot in one tape may induce an overcurrent quench on other tapes. This will not happen in a cable with high TCR. In this case, the tape with a hot spot will quench and burn out before inducing a quench on other tapes. The developed modeling tool can be used to design CORC cables with improved thermal stability.