Maximum reduction of energy losses in multicore MgB $$_{2}$$ 2 wires by metastructured soft-ferromagnetic coatings

Abstract When compared with rare-earth coated conductors, magnesium diboride superconducting cables are known to show significant advantages by cost and easy production. However, the inherent difficulty for achieving a significant reduction of their magnetization losses in multifilamentary wires, without degrading the high critical current density that is so characteristic of the monowire, is considered as one of the major drawbacks for their practical use in high power density applications. Being this one of the major markets for superconducting cables, from fundamental principles and computational optimization techniques, in this paper we demonstrate how the embedding of the superconducting filaments into soft-ferromagnetic metastructures can render to their full magnetic decoupling, and therefore, to the maximum reduction of the energy losses that can be achieved without deteriorate the critical current density of the cable. The designed multifilamentary metastructure is made of NbTi coated MgB2 superconducting filaments in a Cu-matrix, serving as a reference for validating our model with actual experimental measurements in monowires and multifilamentary wires. The novelty in our computationally aided multifilamentary wires, is that each one of the filaments is embedded within a thin metastructure made of a soft-ferromagnetic layer and a resistive layer. We have found that for soft-ferromagnetic layers with magnetic permeabilities in the range of $$\mu _{r}=$$ μ r = 20–100, nearly a full magnetic decoupling between the superconducting filaments can be achieved, leading to efficiencies higher than $$92\%$$ 92 % , and an overall reduction of the AC-losses (including eddy currents at the Cu-matrix) higher than $$50\%$$ 50 % .