Coupled-analysis of current transport performance and thermal behaviour of conduction-cooled Bi-2223/Ag double-pancake coil for magnetic sail spacecraft

Highlights: • We model current transport and thermal performances of conduction-cooled HTS coil. • We investigate the effect of the longitudinal inhomogeneity of the HTS tape. • The analysis can precisely estimate performances of the conduction-cooled coil. • The longitudinal inhomogeneity of the HTS tape deteriorates coil performances. • Quench currents of the HTS coil are not consistent with the critical currents. -- Abstract: This paper investigated the quantitative current transport performance and thermal behaviour of a high temperature superconducting (HTS) coil, and the effect of the critical current inhomogeneity along the longitudinal direction of HTS tapes on the coil performances. We fabricated a double-pancake coil using a Bi-2223/Ag tape with a length of 200 m as a scale-down model for a magnetic sail spacecraft. We measured the current transport property and temperature rises during current applications of the HTS coil in a conduction-cooled system, and analytically reproduced the results on the basis of the percolation depinning model and three-dimensional heat balance equation. The percolation depinning model can describe the electric field versus current density of HTS tapes as a function of temperature and magnetic field vector, and we also introduced the longitudinal distribution of the local critical current of the HTS tape into this model. As a result, we can estimate the critical currents of the HTS coil within 10% error for a wide range of the operational temperatures from 45 to 80 K, and temperature rises on the coil during current applications. These results showed that our analysis and conduction-cooled system were successfully realized. The analysis also suggested that the critical current inhomogeneity along the length of the HTS tape deteriorated the current transport performance and thermal stability of the HTS coil. The present study contributes to the characterization of HTS coils and design of a coil system for the magnetic sail spacecraft