The following paper, published by the IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organisation for the advancement of technology, has been co-authored by Tratos President Albano Bragagni and other Tratos members including Mr Massimo Seri. It revolves around the electrical characterisation of ENEA Superconducting Cable.
Abstract: ENEA is currently involved in the design and manufacture of a fully high-temperature superconductor (HTS) cable in the cable-in-conduit conductor (CICC) configuration exploiting commercial second generation ReBaCuO (Re: Rare Earth and Y) coated-conductors. The final cable will be composed of five slots obtained in a helically twisted aluminum central core and filled with 2G tape stacks. This conductor is designed to operate above 10 kA in 12 T background field at 4.2 K or at about 10 kA in self-field at 77 K. A first sample of about 1-m length with one fully superconductive slot has been manufactured using 15 tapes provided by Superpower, Inc. and 12 tapes from the SuNAM Company grouped in two sub-stacks divided by a Kapton foil. Each tape of the stack has been characterized individually by measuring critical current values I c at 77 K (liquid N 2 bath) in self-field and n-index. Results revealed that the tapes showed no degradation of critical current values when compared with suppliers specifications confirming that the proposed manufacturing process is fully compatible with commercial coated conductors. Inter-tape resistance(R inter ) has also been measured and the observed dependence of R inter on the tape position in the stack has been put in correlation with transverse stress distribution calculated by finite element models. A second sample with a full superconducting slot has been manufactured using 18 SuNAM tapes. Preliminary results on the stack transport measurements performed at 77 K in self-field will be presented and discussed. All the samples were manufactured by using already existing industrial equipments at Tratos Cavi SpA.
The paper was published in the IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity ( Volume: 25, Issue: 3, June 2015).
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