Design criteria for stability in cable-in-conduit conductors

Stability is a key point in the design of large conductors for application in fusion machines such as NETY or ITER. In the electromagnetically noisy environment characterizing the surroundings of a plasma, the superconductor should be stable against all expected heat deposition, including a.c. losses driven by plasma disruptions. Since all sources of thermal perturbations cannot be adequately identified, predicted or calculated, the design must allow for suitable margins. To ensure this, stability must be considered as a design criterion which is checked by means of analytical and numerical methods and later calibrated against experimental measurements of transient heat transfer and stability behaviour. In this paper the procedure developed at NET is described for the design and analysis of the stability margin of conductors for the toroidal and poloidal field coils. These methods are applied to the generation of stability curves and maps which are used to set operating limits for the 40 kA NET conductor. The design criteria and analytical methods can be appropriately modified for other conductors and coil applications. (author)