Construction and test of a 1 MVA-class BSCCO resonator coil

A high quality factor, superconducting resonator coil is developed in cooperation with the Dutch companies SMIT Transformers and SMIT DRAAD. The coil system is manufactured in industry, using industrial tooling. It has a design reactive power rating of 1 MVA at a frequency of 50 Hz and the operating temperature is 64 K. The system consists of four concentric but separate coils, made of 2 km of Bi-2223 conductors from two different manufacturers. The coils are optimized by shaping the magnetic field around the coil edges with ferro-magnetic C-cups to reach a design electrical quality factor of 1000. The system is operated in a glass-epoxy cryostat at 64 K and 77 K. The resonator coil design demonstrates all the superconducting elements that are essential for manufacturing superconducting transformers. A numerical model has been developed to predict the DC and AC behavior of the system based on measurements of short samples and test coils. A comparison is made between the experiment and model calculations.