IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON APPLIED SUPERCONDUCTIVITY, VOL. 17, NO.

2, JUNE 2007

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Quench in High-Temperature Superconducting Motor

Field Coils: Computer Simulations and Comparison
With Experiments
Boris A. Shoykhet and Stephen D. Umans, Fellow, IEEE
AbstractFor high temperature superconducting (HTS) motor
field coils two types of quench initiation are of practical importance. The first type will be referred to as current induced quench
(CIQ). It typically occurs during coil or assembled rotor testing,
when the current is increased in small increments until the quench
is detected. The current at which the quench starts is referred to as
the quench current q [1][7]. The objective of these experiments
is to establish actual limits of operational conditions. The second
type will be referred to as temperature induced quench (TIQ) and
it is caused by failure or malfunctioning of the cooling system. The
examples include vacuum deterioration, cryocooler failure etc. Numerous CIQ experiments [1][8], [10] have showed a certain pattern of quench event, including a well defined q , slow near-linear
increase with respect to time of coil voltage and temperature with
subsequent transition to fast non-linear voltage and temperature
growth. TIQ experiments [10] showed the same behavior when
coil cooling system was shut down while the current was maintained constant. The presented here work is a computational 2-D
and 3-D Finite Element Analysis (FEA) study of CIQ and TIQ in
HTS coils. The effects of magnetic field, non-homogeneity of tape
properties, current sharing and amount of stabilizer are studied.
It is shown that the formation and propagation of the normal zone
is preceded by the process that we chose to call pre-quench instability. The pre-quench instability starts when the current exceeds
q and demonstrates experimentally observed features mentioned
above. It is shown that with an insufficient amount of stabilizer for
second generation (2-G) HTS tapes the pre-quench instability may
be practically undetectable. The comparison with some of the experiments [8], [10] is presented. We intensively used the concepts
developed in articles [1][6]. Many (but not all) our conclusions are
in agreement with [1][6].

I. GENERAL MODEL
HE model includes the superconducting coils and other relevant components of the cryostat, such as the coil support
structure, cooling system and the current leads. In any quench
model of HTS motor coils the following three factors should be
present: the effect of magnetic field on the dissipation in the superconductor, the effect of the cooling system and the effect of
heat sources other than the dissipation in the superconductor.
Obviously the magnetic field in HTS coil depends on the
whole HTS winding, not just the coil itself, and will be different

Manuscript received August 25, 2006. This work was supported in part by the
U.S. Department of Energy through a Superconductivity Partnership Initiative
program under cooperative agreement DE-FC36-93CH10580 with the Reliance
Electric Company.
B. Shoykhet is with Rockwell Automation Power Systems Advance Technology Laboratory, Richmond Heights, OH, USA (e-mail: bashoykhet@powersystems.rockwell.com).
S. D. Umans is an independent consultant (e-mail: umans@alum.mit.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TASC.2007.898029

depending on whether the individual coil is tested separately in

a cryostat or the same coil is used in the rotor of an electric machine. In this work we will always speak about one coil because
typically all coils in the winding are in the same conditions, and
the magnetic interaction between the coils can be taken into account through appropriate symmetry boundary conditions.
In our applications, the magnetic field in the coil can be determined from the solution of static magnetic field problem. Because of that, we chose an algorithm in which the static magnetic
field problem is solved prior to the solution of thermal modeling
of the quench event itself. The solution is obtained for whole
range of anticipated currents and stored for usage in the thermal
model.
There is an inherent error introduced by variation of magnetic
field across the width of superconducting tape. The characterization of HTS tapes is done in conditions when the magnetic field
is uniform across the tape while in the real coil the variation of
magnetic field is significant enough to change the characteristic
current by 510 amperes. Hence whatever value of magnetic
flux would be chosen as representative for a particular location,
it will introduce uncertainty of an order of few amperes in . In
its turn it will introduce the inherent error of the similar magnitude into . For 2-G tapes with width of 1 cm, this error will be
even larger.
All material properties, the resistivity of stabilizer, thermal
conductivities, and specific heat, are introduced as functions of
temperature. The superconducting tape is a composite material
and common formulas for composites are used to determine the
average material properties. It should be noted that the calculation of thermal conductivity also introduces significant uncertainty because the results are very sensitive to the thickness of
insulation which can not be exactly known in wound structures
such as a superconducting coil. The best way is to use experimental values if they are available. The usage of averaging in
the direction perpendicular to the tape is inevitable because the
tape is very thin and direct introduction of separate conductors
would result in unmanageable FEA meshes. In the direction parallel to the broad face of the tape, it is feasible to introduce into
the FEA model individual pancakes with insulation layers between them. However we choose not to do that and use average
properties in that direction as well. Our belief is that the model
with averaged properties provides the same degree of accuracy
as the more complicated model with the individual pancakes.
From the quench point of view, the most important characteristic of the cooling system is the relation between the amount of
the heat absorbed by the cooling system and the temperature of
the cold space. In the simplest case of the stationary cold space

1051-8223/$25.00 2007 IEEE

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thermally anchored to the cold head of a cryocooler, this characrelating the

teristic is an experimentally measured curve
temperature of the cold head with the amount of the heat absorbed by the cold head. If we assume that the cold head is an
then the formal boundary condition beisothermal surface
comes

(1)
In rotating superconducting machinery the cooling is provided by circulating a coolant between the cryocooler and the
rotor cold space. There are many different ways of doing so and
they can not be reduced to a kind of one universal condition.
Here we limit ourselves to the condition (1) which will be interis located
preted as follows. An isothermal cooling surface
in the cold space, and the total removed heat is a known function
of the temperature of the cooling surface.
One particular case of condition (1) is when the cooling is
so good that the cooling surface simply remains at a constant
temperature over the whole range of the anticipated heat fluxes,
like when a stationary coil is cooled by liquid cryogen boiling.
Until a normal zone is formed the heat generation in the coil
is typically small and it may be assumed that the temperature
of the cooling surface is equal to the boiling temperature of the
cryogen:

Here is the volume occupied by the thermal model of the

cold space. The boundary conditions are (1) or (2) and (3). The
initial condition is the steady state solution of corresponding to
the zero current. This mimics the typical real situation, when
the coil is energized after the temperature of the cold space is
stabilized.
Consider also the auxiliary steady-state problem providing
the temperature in cold space with the current applied under
assumption that the HTS coils do not have any loss:

(7)
The solution of (7) with boundary conditions (1) or (2) and (3)
will be referred to as the background temperature and denoted
. Notice that the background temperature can not be
by
experimentally observed with the exception of situations when
the background load does not depend on the current.
The implemented dissipation law is presented in details in
[11]. The current in the superconducting tape is the sum of
in the
the current in the superconductor and the current
stabilizer:
(8)
Current sharing between the superconductor and the stabilizer is found from the condition that the electric fields in the
superconductor and in the stabilizer are the same:

(2)

(9)

In rotating superconducting machinery a liquid cryogen is

typically supplied by a close loop heat siphon system. If the
system is designed in such a way that the pressure at the boiling
surface is near constant then the boundary condition (2) is applicable.
The heat load other than the dissipation in the superconductor
will be referred to as the background load and includes current
leads, radiation, solid conduction through the cold space support structure, normal conductors such as joints and connectors,
heaters installed for experimental purposes and so on. We introduce it into the model as volumetric heat dissipation and
:
surface heat flux applied at surface

The electric field and the current in the stabilizer are related
by Ohm law:

(3)
Generally speaking both functions and may depend on
the spatial coordinates , temperature and current:
(4)

(10)
is temperature dependent resistivity of the stabilizer,
where
is the cross-section of the stabilizer.
The electric field in the superconductor is expressed in terms
of the current by power law

(11)
where
is an arbitrarily chosen constant (typically 0.1 or 1
microvolt/cm), is referred to as the characteristic current and is
referred to as the power constant. Eqs.(8)(11) are the system
of non-linear equations in which the parameters are known and
parameters are to be determined. After that the loss in the superconducting tape (per unit length of the tape) is found

Heat dissipation in the superconductor, , also is a function

of the same arguments:
(12)
(5)
The thermal model of the cold space is the thermal conductivity equation
(6)

where is the common value of the electric field in the superconductor and the stabilizer. In the process of FEA simulation
the solution of equations Eqs.(8)(11) is done millions of times
using a robust and reliable algorithm covering all possible range
of the parameter variations.

SHOYKHET AND UMANS: QUENCH IN HTS MOTOR FIELD COILS: COMPUTER SIMULATIONS

1625

Now introduce the reduced temperature as [11]

(13)
Where
is the critical temperature corresponding to
the perpendicular and parallel components of magnetic flux density. The depends on and depends on :
(14)
Fig. 1. 2-D thermal model of 1000 hp HTS motor rotor coil.

The FEA was done using ANSYS. Specific expressions for

,
and
are programmed as macros.
II. FEA ANALYSIS OF CURRENT INDUCED QUENCH IN HTS
COILS
The procedure of finding the quench current essentially
mimics the physical experiment conducted with the same
objective. First, with zero current the steady-state solution is
obtained, and then a current is applied and is kept constant.
If the solution is stabilized, the current is increased. If an
instability occurs the current is decreased. The quench current
is between the maximal current at which the coil was stable and
the minimal current at which the coil was unstable. The solution
process is continued until the quench current is determined
with a desired accuracy.
We conducted a significant parametric study of CIQ and TIQ,
,
and
including many different expressions for
ranging from constant values to non-linear approximations based on available 1-G and 2-G wire properties, homogeneous coils and the coils having defects of various aspect ratios and sizes, varying stabilizer content, current density, operational temperatures, cryocooler characteristics. These simulations showed certain common features that will be illustrated
here on one particular example of 2-D model of 1000 hp HTS
motor [12] racetrack coil with first generation (1-G) HTS wire.
The thermal model cross-section is shown in Fig. 1. The crosssection is perpendicular to the conductor direction. The coil is
wound in such a way that the broad face of superconducting
tape is parallel to vertical direction in Fig. 1. The wire properties where chosen based on [9]. We used the following specifications for dissipation law:

Fig. 2. 1000 hp HTS motor rotor racetrack coil; variation of I due to magnetic
field.

Some observations from the model include:

1) The magnetic field is highly non-uniform across the coil
and causes very large variation of . Fig. 2 shows for current 130 A and uniform temperature of 30 K. The minimal
is 158 A while the maximal is 304 A. Thus we do not
see a way of using an average across the coil cross-section
as suggested in [6].
2) Coil temperature estimation at quench initiation. We denote the steady-state temperature of the cold space correas
. Further, let
sponding to the current
be the location within the superconducting winding where
reaches the maximum. The following approximate
formula takes place:

(16)

(15)
The magnetic field was calculated for a configuration corresponding to 4-pole air-core 1000 hp HTS motor rotor.

where
is the background temperature in location
while
and
are the critical temperature and -value in that location1.
In our example, direct FEA calculation provided
while (16) yielded 32.2 K. Notice
that here the background temperature is equal to the temperature of the boundary. We modified the example adding
the background load as the heat flux of 1600
applied to the top of the coil. The quench current dropped
from 155.6 A to 146 A. The background temperature
and (16) provided 34.4 K while the
1Eq.

(16) is generalization of result obtained in [3].

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Fig. 3. Temperature in location x . Current I

= I + 1 A.

Fig. 5. Current sharing constant 

= I =I and temperature in location x

Fig. 6. TIQ. Temperature in location x :I

Fig. 4. Coil voltage. Current I

= I + 1 A.

direct FEA result was 34.2 K. The presented discrepancy

between actual
and (16) is typical. The significant deviations from (16) occur only in the situations of
extremely well cooled small coils or for small defects
inside of generally good coils; in both cases this deviation
is associated with large current sharing. But even in these
cases (16) provides a correct bulk value. Thus we arrive at
the following extremely important conclusion: at quench
current the coil temperatures are well below the critical
temperatures and the unstable temperature growth starts
well in advance of any normal zone formation. This conclusion is in agreement with [1][6], [10].
3) Consider now the typical coil behavior when the applied
current slightly exceeds the quench current. Figs. 3 and 4
show the temperature in location
and the coil voltage
versus time. The initial temperature is the steady-state solution corresponding to . Then the current was incremented
by 1 A. The solution exhibits the following features.
a) The whole quench event is comprised of three steps
which we choose to call the near-linear step, the acceleration step and the true quench step.
b) During the near-linear step the temperature and
voltage vary near-linear with time. The first step
occupies most of the total time of the quench event.
Here current sharing is very small, fraction of a
per-cent, see Fig. 5.

= I 0 1:6 A

c) During the acceleration step, the temperature and

voltage increase in a non-linear fashion. This step
ends when the temperature reaches the critical temwhich is 57.2 K, and the
perature in location
normal zone appears. The current sharing constant
drops below 90% only 2 seconds before the normal
zone formation.
d) During the true quench the normal zone is formed
and propagates. The temperature rise becomes near
adiabatic. However, our modeling becomes deficient
as soon as the coil voltage becomes of an order of
a few volts. The reason is that we assume that the
current remains constant during the whole event. In
real the world, the current supply will not be able to
maintain a constant current above a voltage of a few
volts, and will start to work as kind of a shunt thus
decreasing the current. We choose to call the first two
steps of the quench eventthe near-linear step and
accelerationthe pre-quench instability.
e) During the near-linear step the slope of the temperature and voltage plots is approximately proportional
between the applied
to the difference
current and quench current.
f) The pre-quench instability is a slow process that could
is small [8],
last many minutes and even hours, if
[10].
1 TIQ exhibits exactly the same qualitative features as
CIQ. Fig. 6 shows the temperature resulting from

SHOYKHET AND UMANS: QUENCH IN HTS MOTOR FIELD COILS: COMPUTER SIMULATIONS

1627

Fig. 7. Effect of amount of stabilizer on coil voltage.

changing the condition on cooling surface from fixed

temperature to adiabatic. The current is 1.6 A below
the quench current for the original cooling conditions.
III. EFFECT OF STABILIZER ON QUENCH EVENT PATTERN
From a practical point of view, the existence of pre-quench
instability is a very useful property of HTS coils, helping in
quench detection and protection. It is interesting to study the
conditions when this phenomenon does not exist or becomes
undetectable. This study will be subject of separate paper. Here
we limit ourselves with few conclusions.
The pre-quench instability in HTS exists as long as the
-value is not too large. There is no well defined bound separating small and large -values, but typical -values for
HTS materials do not exceed 40 and it is certainly not too
large. Thus in all HTS coils (1-G and 2-G) the pre-quench
instability exists.
The pre-quench instability may become undetectable under
a combination of three conditions: the coil should have small
defects, the current density should be high and the amount of
stabilizer is not sufficient. We will not attempt here to quantify
these obviously vague statements and provide one artificially
constricted example.
Fig. 7 shows 3-D quench simulations of a coil with single defect and 2-G wire. Case 2 has 4% as much stabilizer as case 1; all
the other wire properties and the applied current are the same.
and the
For the first case, this current is significantly below
voltage quickly stabilizes. For the second case, the coil quenches
without any warning visible on voltage plot; the voltage increased from 4.3 mV to 174 V in 10 msec. Notice that up to the
quench moment the voltages are practically identical for the two
cases studied.
IV. COMPARISON WITH EXPERIMENTS
The variability of the superconducting tape and inconsistency
in manufacturing processes result in a large variation of properties of the superconductor. It is not uncommon that the dissipation in nominally identical coils may differ by a factor of
10 and more. Thus in order to closely predict the behavior of a
specific coil we need the continuous characterization of the tape
during production and in addition to that we need to know exactly were each particular piece of wire is located in the coil.
This is a completely unrealistic request. Thus what is left is to

Fig. 8. 200 hp HTS motor coil voltage. FEA-1-physically incorrect model nevertheless in good agreement with experiment. FEA-2: physically correct model
but worse agreement with experiment.

tune the parameters of the computer model using the same experiment as the model is supposed to predict, which contradicts
to the fundamental principle of experimenting.
Our belief is that the model that is used in this work is rich
enough to match any experiment, but that alone does not prove
that the model is correct. Fig. 8 shows the experimental and FEA
computed voltage of a 200 hp HTS motor rotor coil [8] tested
at liquid nitrogen temperature. There are two FEA curves. The
curve marked FEA-1 was obtained by tuning to match the
experimental voltage up to 3/4 of the quench current. The FEA
curve almost perfectly matches the experiment despite the fact
that the model did not include the dependency of on magnetic
field and hence it is physically incorrect.
The curve marked FEA-2 was obtained using physically correct law which included the effect of magnetic field. The result is obviously much worse because the tuning of the law
was done using an experiment with a different coil which supposedly had the same superconducting tape. However, in the
same experiment we measured also the voltages in six pancakes
which the coil was comprised of. The dissipation in the pancakes
was strongly affected by the magnetic field, and the second
model provided reasonable agreement with the experiment (see
Fig. 9) while the first model showed completely wrong distribution of voltages between the pancakes. Then we bolted together
two 200 hp HTS motor coils in order to change the magnetic
field that each coil seen when tested individually. Again, the
second law provided correct qualitative results: the quench current dropped as model predicted, the distribution of voltages between the pancakes changed in qualitative agreement with predictions.
V. CONCLUSIONS
The FEA modeling presented in this paper implies that mathematical model of the coil quench event is correct. The major
physical limitation is the assumption that the superconducting
tape is 1-D conductor comprised of a parallel connection of
superconductor and the stabilizer. This assumption is implicitly implied when the wire is characterized by measuring the
properties averaged over the wire sample. Obviously at some

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON APPLIED SUPERCONDUCTIVITY, VOL. 17, NO. 2, JUNE 2007

mond Heights, Ohio. This work was funded in part by the

U.S. Department of Energy through a Superconductivity
Partnership Initiative program under cooperative agreement
DE-FC36-93CH10580 with the Reliance Electric Company.

REFERENCES

Fig. 9. Current producing average 1 V/cm electric field in pancakes. Experimental data are average values for four nominally identical 200 hp HTS motor
coils.

high level of the current density and small amount of stabilizer this assumption will not be correct, but at this point we can
not quantify that. Other than that, we believe that any discrepancy between the computer simulations and the experiments is
caused by incomplete information about the material properties,
the superconducting tape being by far the major factor. This incompleteness is inevitable and the expectations regarding the
quantitative agreement with the experiments should not be too
high. A tuning of the model can be done to match any specific coil behavior, but that does not make too much of a practical sense because our main objective is to predict rather than
fit collected data. On the other hand, the computer simulations
show all quantitative features of the actual coil behavior, and as
far as we can judge from conducted comparisons with the experiments, they show correct trends and thus it is invaluable tool
for coil design for HTS applications.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was conducted at the Rockwell Automation
Power Systems Advanced Technology Laboratory in Rich-

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