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Achieving low AC-loss armature windings is a key challenge to enable all-HTS motors. Large AC-loss is induced in the HTS armature windings through interaction with the rotating magnetic field generated by the rotor. To reduce the AC loss in the armature windings, it is important to minimize the impact of the rotating magnetic field, especially the component perpendicular to the broad face of REBCO conductors. This work presents two different 1500 rpm, 50 kW all-HTS motor designs with different iron pole shapes: one with pole shoes on the iron core for diverting the magnetic flux around the coil windings, and one without pole shoes. REBCO coated conductors are considered for both the armature and field windings and 2D finite-element models of both designs are built using the T-A formulation and moving meshes. System-wise analysis of the motor in terms of weight and efficiency is discussed based on the simulated AC loss results. The simulation results show that, at 65 K, flux diverting pole shoes provide a 51% AC loss reduction in the HTS armature windings, without weight penalty or motor power rating reduction. Furthermore, simulation results at 20 K show that the AC loss decreases with decreasing operating temperature due to a decrease in the penetrated field in the HTS windings, which reduces the magnetization loss component.

Magnetic lens, exploiting the induced screening current, may concentrate the spatial magnetic flux. This concept has been realized by several research groups using GdBCO and/or MgB₂ bulk superconductors. The limitation of the magnitude of concentrated flux density lies on the mechanical brittleness of the materials and the flux instability. High-temperature superconducting (HTS) tape possesses excellent mechanical and flux pinning properties and hence is a good candidate for magnetic lens. In this study, we implemented numerical simulations on the design of magnetic lenses using HTS stacked tapes. The models were constructed based on H-ϕ formulations. We investigated and compared the concentration effect of various magnetic lenses with different topologies. The results show that a central field of 22.69 T and 25.62 T can be achieved respectively with rectangular-shaped stacks and X-shaped stacks in an applied magnetic field of 20 T. An optimized design of the magnetic lens has been proposed and correspondingly the mechanism for a better concentration-effect has been explained which provides a good reference for future experiments and applications.

One of the potential applications of ring-shaped, single grain RE-Ba-Cu-O bulk superconductors is in desktop magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) systems as an alternative to conventional permanent magnets. The higher magnetic field available from magnetized bulk superconductors could significantly improve the performance of such systems, as well as reduce their size and increase portability. The pulsed field magnetization (PFM) method provides a fast, compact and cost-effective method for magnetizing these materials as trapped field magnets. However, bulk superconducting rings are very suscep-tible to thermomagnetic instabilities during the PFM process, and thus, to date, the reported trapped fields in ring bulks magnet-ized by PFM are less than 0.35 T at the centre of single rings. In this work, we demonstrate that the trapped field in a super-conducting ring bulk can be enhanced significantly by optimizing the waveform of the magnetizing pulse used in the PFM method. This optimization can be achieved easily by using an Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor as a fast-switching device with a control-lable switching frequency in the pulse-generating electric circuit. Our findings represent a key step forward in utilizing bulk, sin-gle-grain superconducting rings magnetized by PFM in portable magnet systems.

A robust and reliable in-situ magnetization method is essential for exploiting the outstanding magnetic flux trapping ability of bulk superconductors in practical applications. We report a 4.8 T peak trapped magnetic field, B T, achieved at 30 K in a 36 mm diameter GdBa2Cu3O7-δ –Ag bulk superconductor using pulsed field magnetization (PFM). To realize this, we have developed a reliable two-step multi-pulse PFM process based on understanding and exploiting the avalanche-like flux jump phenomenon observed in these materials. The magnitude of the applied pulsed magnetic field (B a) necessary to trap 4.8 T was merely 5.29 T, corresponding to a remarkable magnetization efficiency (B T/B a) of 90%.

The high-Tc superconducting (HTS) dynamo is a promising device that can inject large DC supercurrents into a closed superconducting circuit. This is particularly attractive to energise HTS coils in NMR/MRI magnets and superconducting rotating machines without the need for connection to a power supply via current leads. It is only very recently that quantitatively accurate, predictive models have been developed which are capable of analysing HTS dynamos and explain their underlying physical mechanism. In this work, we propose to use the HTS dynamo as a new benchmark problem for the HTS modelling community. The benchmark geometry consists of a permanent magnet rotating past a stationary HTS coated-conductor wire in the open-circuit configuration, assuming for simplicity the 2D (infinitely long) case. Despite this geometric simplicity the solution is complex, comprising time-varying spatially-inhomogeneous currents and fields throughout the superconducting volume. In this work, this benchmark problem has been implemented using several different methods, including H-formulation-based methods, coupled H-A and T-A formulations, the Minimum Electromagnetic Entropy Production method, and integral equation and volume integral equation-based equivalent circuit methods. Each of these approaches show excellent qualitative and quantitative agreement for the open-circuit equivalent instantaneous voltage and the cumulative time-averaged equivalent voltage, as well as the current density and electric field distributions within the HTS wire at key positions during the magnet transit. A critical analysis and comparison of each of the modelling frameworks is presented, based on the following key metrics: number of mesh elements in the HTS wire, total number of mesh elements in the model, number of degrees of freedom (DOFs), tolerance settings and the approximate time taken per cycle for each model., 22 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables

The development of a new hard x-ray beamline I-TOMCAT equipped with a 1-meter-long short-period bulk high-temperature superconductor undulator (BHTSU) has been scheduled for the upgrade of the Swiss Light Source (SLS 2.0) at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). The very hard x-ray source generated by the BHTSU will increase the brilliance at the beamline by over one order of magnitude in comparison to other state-of-the-art undulator technologies and allow experiments to be carried out with photon energies in excess of 60 keV. One of the key challenges for designing a 1-meter-long (100 periods) BHTSU is the large-scale simulation of the magnetization currents inside 200 staggered-array bulk superconductors. A feasible approach to simplify the electromagnetic model is to retain five periods from both ends of the 1-meter-long BHTSU, reducing the number of degrees of freedom (DOFs) to the scale of millions. In this paper, the theory of the recently-proposed 2D A-V formulation-based backward computation method is extended to calculate the critical state magnetization currents in the ten-period staggered-array BHTSU in 3D. The simulation results of the magnetization currents and the associated undulator field along the electron beam axis are compared with the well-known 3D H-formulation and the highly efficient 3D H-{\phi} formulation method, all methods showing excellent agreement with each other as well as with experimental results. The mixed H-{\phi} formulation avoids computing the eddy currents in the air subdomain and is significantly faster than the full H-formulation method, but is slower in comparison to the A-V formulation-based backward computation. Finally, the fastest and the most efficient A-V formulation in ANSYS 2020R1 Academic is adopted to optimize the integrals of the undulator field along the electron beam axis by optimizing the sizes of the end bulks., Comment: 19 pages, 12 figures

In this paper, the trapped field B z , thermal hoop stress σ θ cool by cooling from 300 to 50 K, and electromagnetic hoop stress σ θ FCM during field-cooled magnetization (FCM) from B app = 6.3 and 9.4 T are investigated numerically for ring-shaped REBaCuO bulks with various inner diameters (I.D.) and heights (H) and reinforced by an Al alloy ring. For simplicity, an identical critical current density J c (B), which is a typical value at 50 K, is assumed in the simulation. The B z value at the center of the ring bulk changes depending on the I.D. and H values of the ring bulk, which results from the different distribution of the superconducting current. As a result, the total hoop stress σ θ total (= σ θ cool + σ θ FCM ) also changes for each ring bulk and each B app because of the variation of the σ θ cool and σ θ FCM values. The maximum σ θ total value, which affects the bulk fracture at B app = 9.4 T, increases with decreasing the height of ring bulk. These results can present guidelines for designing a trapped-field magnet using ring bulks.

The two-step Top Seeded Infiltration and Growth (TSIG) melt process has emerged as a successful and reliable technique for the fabrication of single grain (RE)Ba2Cu3O7- (where RE is a rare-earth element or yttrium) bulk high temperature superconductors with engineered microstructures that exhibit improved superconducting properties. In this study, the performance of these materials in large applied magnetic fields has been investigated by field cooling single grain samples in a magnetic field of 18 T. YBa2Cu3O7- samples processed without added Ag by the TSIG technique, in the two-sample stack configuration, trapped a magnetic field of 14.3 T at 28 K after field cooling from 100 K and subsequent removal of the applied field. This result is particularly significant in that, previously, only single grain (RE)Ba2Cu3O7- bulk superconductors containing Ag have been reported to be able to tolerate the large stresses on the samples inherent in the magnetisation process at large fields. The samples prepared in the present study were pre-stressed using a reinforcing stainless-steel ring, although, otherwise, they did not contain any additives, dopants or resin impregnation. The ability of samples processed by TSIG to withstand large tensile forces without Ag-addition is attributed to the reduced incidence of intrinsic cracks/pores in the single grain microstructure.

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IOP Publishing via https://doi.org/10.1088/0953-2048/29/6/060303