Magnetothermal modeling of multilayer HTS tapes for quality control at room temperature

•Structural defect characterization in 2G multilayer high temperature superconductors (HTS).•Characterization at room temperature.•Eddy current thermography (ECT).•2D magnetothermal modeling. This work highlights the possibility of structural defect characterization in 2G multilayer high temperature superconducting (HTS) tapes, using eddy current thermography (ECT) at room temperature. A 2D magnetothermal modeling approach is developed, where an integral model is used for the eddy currents modeling in the different layers of the HTS tape, in the frequency domain, and at room temperature, associated to a thermal modeling in the time domain by using the finite difference method. The tape being a very thin multilayer structure presenting multiscale dimensions, a homogenization approach is proposed to reduce the computing time. Thermal mappings allow to verify the detectability of defects which are introduced in the different layers of the tape cross-section. The obtained results are compared with finite element analysis for validation purposes.