Thermal Analysis of Quench Propagation in Superconducting Coils

The transient three-dimensional conduction equation with a source term that accounts for the propagating resistive wave front has been solved for a superconducting magnet coil by the control volume finite-difference method with floating nodes. Coupled with this, the code solves the electrical and magnetic circuit equations. Because of the large number of nodes dictated by the geometric structure of the coil, an alternate direction implicit (ADI) technique was used to overcome the computer storage problem. The behavior of the propagating front and the highly nonlinear material properties limit the size of the solution time steps. A variable time step and variable number of nodes have been used to reduce the overall computational time. The results of the analysis are in excellent agreement with experimental data.