Theoretical and experimental study of AC loss in high temperature superconductor single pancake coils

The electromagnetic properties of a pancake coil in an AC regime as a function of the number of turns is studied theoretically and experimentally. Specifically, the AC loss, the coil critical current and the voltage signal are discussed. The coils are made of Bi2Sr2Ca2Cu3O10/Ag (BiSCCO) tape, although the main qualitative results are also applicable to other kinds of superconducting tape, such as coated conductors. The AC loss and the voltage signal are electrically measured using different pick-up coils with the help of a transformer. One of them avoids dealing with the huge coil inductance. In addition, the critical current of the coils is experimentally determined by conventional DC measurements. Furthermore, the critical current, the AC loss and the voltage signal are simulated, showing a good agreement with the experiments. For all simulations, the field dependent critical current density inferred from DC measurements on a short tape sample is taken into account.