Analysis of the behaviour of superconducting windings with short-circuited turns

Though it is widely known that short-circuited turns can considerably spoil the performance of superconducting windings, this problem (to our knowledge) was not properly discussed in the literature. We performed an analysis of the consequences of the presence of shorted turns inside superconducting windings. The main conclusions are as follows: such windings can undergo premature quenches during their charging, therefore the acceptable charging rates should be very low; such windings can also quench during their planned discharge; and a considerable amount of the stored magnetic energy cannot be effectively evacuated out of a short-circuited winding in the case of its quench