Assessment of the Effect of Current Non-Uniformity on the ITER Nb3Sn Good Joint Short Sample DC Performance

The DC performance of the so-called good joint Nb₃Sn short sample conductor, measured in the SULTAN facility in 1999 with a progressively reduced (chopped) joint length, became worse as the joint became shorter. In this paper we present the analysis of those tests using the THELMA code. The results confirm quantitatively that the loss of performance was due to increasingly unbalanced current distribution. Once the unbalance due to the joint is properly modeled, the performance of the conductor can be fitted using the same extra longitudinal strain in the critical current scaling, proportional to the electromagnetic load but independent of the joint length.