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Design and Development Procedure of HTS Superconducting Solenoids and their Application for Microwave Sources for Fusion and Other Power Devices

Doctoral student:
Santiago Sanz Castillo
Year:
2013
Director(s):
José Luis Martín, Luis Garcia-Tabarés Rodriguez
Description:

The HTS (High critical Temperature Superconductors) materials together with cryocoolers (cryogenic refrigerators) permit to afford a large number of potential applications. Among them, power devices applications stood out, in particular microwave sources for fusion. This thesis is focused in cryocooled 1G HTS solenoids, but this election is argued to be flexible enough for the most remarkable applications. HTS materials where discovered more than 25 years ago. It was patented its potential from the beginning, but the difficulties to obtain a practical wire were underestimated. Nowadays, one can find commercially available wire, but at high cost and without enough testing in large scale applications in the long term. There are some prototypes and incipient commercial applications, but still reliable manufacturing procedures and design tools are not well established. The other pillar in which supports this development is the availability of small size cryocoolers. They are reliable commercial finished products developed for other applications (as vacuum pumps). However, they have low efficiency (compared to the ideal Carnot refrigerator) and require a carefully cryostat design, as the available cooling power is really small. Which was achieved in this thesis is to depth in all the aspects required for the design, manufacturing and testing of HTS coils refrigerated by means of a cryocooler. The intention of the author was easing and speeding up the development of such devices and at the end to contribute to the development of practical large scale HTS applications. The orientation has been not only theoretical, but also practical. A cryogen-free cryostat has been setup to achieve double pancake coils cooling by means of a cryocooler. Several coils have been constructed up to large scale, and a representative section of a large scale magnet has been constructed with successful results.