Bending charaterization of an HTS strand with geometrical symmetric structure

An high temperature superconducting (HTS) strand, quadrangularly and systematically arranged by four stacks made from the second generation (2G) HTS tapes, was proposed for improving critical current anisotropy and current carrying current capacity. The strand consists of two components of stacked 2G tapes and outer sheaths which are normal metals as jackets. A strand model with round cross-sections aluminum sheath was designed and fabricated for evaluating the availability of the bending characteristics except for reducing critical current anisotropy. In order to demonstrate their bending characteristics, the dependences of critical current on bending in-plane radii for 2G tapes and bending radii for the strand sample were tested in self field and 77 K. The results show that the bending radii of the strand sample is higher than the in-plane bending radii of 2G tape.