Influence of current diffusion in superconducting magnet fabricated by high stabilizer aluminium on quench propagation

The development of conductors with an aluminum super-stabilizer was proposed for some applications of accelerator detector magnets for high-energy physics and superconducting magnet storage energy devices. The conductors are designed with the cryogenics stabilization by using a large amount of low resistance aluminum stabilizer. However, it has induced to some new problems. One of these is the effect of the current redistribution between superconducting strands and stabilizer on the quench propagation and stability. In this study, we assume a superconducting magnet to be immersed in liquid helium. A quasi-three-dimensional model is proposed to study thermal diffusion in superconducting magnet and current diffusion is based on the solution of Maxwell's equation. The uniform temperature distribution in the cross-sectional area of conductor is taken into account due to the high thermal conduction of stabilizer and small size compared with the length. An adaptive mesh scheme COLSYS is employed to capture the solution of temperature and current in the front of normal position. The computational model includes nonlinear thermal and electrical characteristics in super-conducting strands and aluminum stabilizer and heat transfer of helium. The influence of current re-distribution between stabilizer and superconducting strands on the quench is studied.