AC Losses and Current Sharing in an YBCO Cable

Power cables constitute one of the most promising industrial applications for HTS materials. The Super3C project aims at establishing the feasibility of a low loss 30 m long 1 kA 10 kV YBCO cable. A major goal of the design is to minimize AC losses. Therefore, a circuit analysis model was tailored for predicting the losses in YBCO cables accurately. During this project, also a 0.5 m long one layer cable was constructed to test the behavior of a real YBCO cable. The AC losses measured from this cable were in good agreement with the computed results and thereby the feasibility of the developed design tool was verified. However, the measurements revealed that differences in contact resistances caused uneven current sharing between the tapes but computational analysis predicted the current sharing to be nearly even in the final 30 m cable.