Investigation of structure of superconducting power transmission cables with LN2 counter-flow cooling

Establishment of long-distance cooling techniques and design of a compact cross section are required for development of HTC superconducting underground power cables. To save space of return coolant, a counter-flow cooling system appears promising. However, it is difficult to cool down long cables because of heat exchange between counter-flows due to high thermal conductivity of dielectric materials which separate both flows in range of liquid nitrogen temperature. We estimated temperature distributions analytically along model HTS power cables with counter-flow. Results of calculation showed that when liquid-nitrogen-impregnated polypropylene laminated paper was chosen for a dielectric material, great thickness was required to reduce heat exchange between counter-flows. We investigated various cable structures to optimize the counter-flow cooling system and cable size