Development and Testing of HTS Double Pancake Coil for SMES Application

Superconducting Magnet Energy Storage (SMES) stores energy in the form of magnetic energy and has very high cycle efficiency compared with other Energy Storage Systems (ESS). It is being used in many power applications, such as instantaneous voltage drop compensation, dampening low frequency, load fluctuation compensation, and pulsed power sources. Recently 2G High-Temperature Superconductors (HTS) have been used for making modular SMES coils in the form of double pancakes, which can be easily assembled as solenoid and toroid. A single double pancake coil is wound using SuNAM make SCNk04200. Fabrication details of each component of the HTS DP coil are presented. The design of the in-house HTS tape insulation using Kapton, DP winding mechanism, which can provide the pretension during winding, and vacuum impregnation are presented. The test setup of testing the DP coil is also provided. The DP coil is tested for I-V characterization and central magnetic field. A Numerical model is also validated using the experiment for future design of large-scale SMES. The comparison is done for the central magnetic field and maximum operating current.