High aspect ratio problem in simulation of a fault current limiter based on superconducting tapes

We are offering a solution for the high-aspect-ratio problem relevant to the numerical simulation of AC loss in superconductors and metals with high aspect (width-to-thickness) ratio. This is particularly relevant to simulation of fault current limiters (FCLs) based on second generation YBCO tapes on RABiTS. By assuming a linear scaling of the electric and thermal properties with the size of the structure, we can replace the real sample with an effective sample of a reduced aspect ratio by introducing size multipliers into the equations that govern the physics of the system. The simulation is performed using both a proprietary equivalent circuit software and a commercial FEM software. The correctness of the procedure is verified by simulating temperature and current distributions for samples with all three dimensions varying within 10 −3 –10 3 of the original size. Qualitatively the distributions for the original and scaled samples are indistinguishable, whereas quantitative differences in the worst case do not exceed 10%.