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Design and Model Test of the Racetrack Excitation Coil in a Novel High Temperature Superconducting Generator
Xiaohang Li, Lei Han, Xiaole Yang, Dong Zhang, Jingye Zhang, and Liye Xiao
AbstractNew developments of the wind power technologies open a wide future in the next decade. One of such developments is the novel high temperature superconducting (HTS) generators using in the wind turbine, which can greatly enhance the power output stability while sharply cut down the volume and weight. A 100 kW model generator is proposed and the racetrack excitation coil for it is designed and tested considering the stability against current pulses. The magnetic eld distribution in the coil is numerically evaluated and measured via a BSCCO practice coil tested in liquid Nitrogen. The electromagnetic design and wind techniques of the coil are also discussed. Index TermsExcitation coil, HTS generator, HTS tape, stability, wind turbine.

I. INTRODUCTION HE rapid development of the renewable energy industry starts a variety of researches on novel power generators, including utilization of new materials such as superconductors and rare-earth magnets, novel structures of the rotor and stator, as well as new driving methods such as direct-driven generators. Especially, in wind power industry, superconducting generators are drawing more and more attentions due to their advantages in weight, volume and stability against variable loads. In recent reports, it is believed that superconducting generator is one of the key approaches to 10 MW and larger wind turbines [1]. Currently, HTS tape is still too expensive to be widely applied. Manufacturers predict it will sharply depreciate in next 35 years. Hence, researchers were encouraged to develop large superconducting generators based on HTS tapes. For wind turbine generators, whose driving forces and loads are highly variable, the advantages of HTS are comparatively low cooling costs, high

efciency, and good stability against temperature and excitation current uctuations. In recent years, several reports on MW scale HTS generators have been published [1][4] and a number of basic problems have emerged during the attempts to further enhance the efciency and stability of the HTS generators. The problems include the eld distributions in the generator, the magnetic eld effects on the current carrying abilities of the tape and the stability parameters, such as the tolerance of the over-currents in the windings. Here, over-current is dened as a DC or AC curlarger than . Besides, ironless rent pulse with peak value structures are also proposed for further size and weight saving. In this work, a 100 kW, 150 rpm wind turbine generator was conceptually designed considering the over-current properties of the HTS tapes and its racetrack excitation coils were wound and tested. The eld distributions, stability properties and wind techniques of the coil were primitively discussed for reference in the future developments of 10 MW wind turbine generators. II. DESIGN CONCEPT OF THE GENERATOR A hybrid structure was proposed for the proposed 100 kW HTS model generator, where the rotor consisted of HTS excitation coils and the stator was made of copper windings. The cross section view of the generator is shown in Fig. 1(a). To control the eld distribution, iron cores similar to that in the conventional generators were used in the rotor and stator. As a semi-direct-driven generator, the designed rotation speed was 150 rpm and the working frequency was 50 Hz, hence the rotor consisted of 20 pairs of double pancake structured racetrack excitation coils. The designed magnetic eld at the air gap, which was about 3 mm in width, was up to 1.2 T, while the average . The outer current density in the HTS tape was diameter and the length of the rotor were 454 mm and 170 mm, respectively, while the inner, outer diameters and the length of the stator were 460 mm, 900 mm and 250 mm, respectively. The spacing between the poles was about 68 mm. The estimated weight of the generator was about 1.8 t. Fig. 2 shows the conceptual design and the dimensions of the racetrack coils for the model generator. Each coil consists of 2 double pancake windings, and each winding consists of 2 6 turns of HTS tape. As shown in Fig. 1(a), the windings will be inserted into the notches of the iron core in the rotor. The magnetic eld distributions in the cross section of the generator were numerically calculated using nite element method (FEM) tools at the working current of 100 A. The result, as shown in

Manuscript received October 20, 2009. First published March 18, 2010; current version published May 28, 2010. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation in China under Grants 50777063, 50677067, and 50507019. X. Li, Dong Zhang, J. Zhang, and L. Xiao are with Key Laboratory of Applied Superconductivity, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Institute of Electrical Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China (e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; xiao@mail. iee.ac.cn). L. Han and X. Yang are with Key Laboratory of Applied Superconductivity, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Electrical Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China and Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100039, China (e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TASC.2010.2041768

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Fig. 1. The cross section view (a) and numerical simulation result of the magnetic ux distribution at 100 A working current (b) of the model.

Fig. 3. Waveforms of the U I responses in BSCCO tape at pulsed currents I , I and I , and duration t , in quasi-adiabatic of I environment.

=2 3

= 200 ms

Fig. 2. Scheme of the racetrack coil in the test generator, unit: mm.

TABLE I PARAMETERS AND PROPERTIES OF THE TAPES PROPOSED TO USE IN THE ROTOR

Fig. 1(b), demonstrates signicant circumference eld close to the air gap, which is perpendicular to the tape surface. Ironless structure was also proposed for enhancing the efciency at high air gap eld, when part of the iron core was saturated, and further saving weight. As a conceptual design, the ironless structure shared the same geometric parameters mentioned above with iron core replaced by nonferromagnetic materials. FEM result showed that the eld perpendicular to the tape surface was up to 0.4 T when the air gap eld was 1.2 T. III. MATERIAL PROPERTIES AT OVER-CURRENTS In a direct-driven wind turbine generator, if the driving force and/or the load varies, current pulses will be directly applied to the excitation coils, therefore the tolerance against over-current in the tape used to wind the coil is important. High strength BSCCO and 344C YBCO tapes manufactured by American Superconductor Corp. (AMSC) were considered here and their properties were measured. The parameters and properties of the two tapes are listed in Table I.

Quench characteristics and thermal stability parameters of HTS tapes have been widely reported in recent papers [3], [5][8], however, it is still difcult to predict the responses of the HTS coils at variable over-current pulses. In this work, curves in tape samples were measured using a 4-electrode immersion and quasi-adiabatic method [8] at direct liquid conditions simulating the heat transfer environments inside the coil. The thermal insulation of the latter was made by wrapping several layers of berglass cloth around the about 20 cm long sample, and then solidied in epoxy. According to the results and at over-current pulses with variable peak values durations , the tolerance against over-currents of the coil can be predicted using a nite element model. results with the peak value of the pulsed Fig. 3 shows the up to and the duration . It 50 Hz AC current is obvious that during the over-current pulse, the voltage across the tape, essentially the resistance of the tape increases with the time increasing, which is a typical heat up response. Afterwards, in the setup of the experiment here, continuous working current was applied to the sample so it was possible to monitor the recovery processes. Careful tests showed that the possibility and time of recovery depend directly on the energy injected by the pulsed over-current and the value of . Fig. 4 shows the comparison of the resistancetime curve at different cooling conditions measured in BSCCO and YBCO and . It tapes at over-current pulses with is obvious that YBCO tape recovers quicker at quasi-adiabatic conditions compared to that in the BSCCO tape. While at direct cooling, the cases are on the contrary. A tentative liquid explanation to this is the YBCO tape used here has better heat transfer along the tape compared to that of the BSCCO tape, while the heat conductivity of YBCO at the upper and lower surfaces are different because one side is the substrate and the other is high conductive Cu. As most parts of the windings are bath, the quick recovery in not directly cooled by the liquid the thermal insulated case is more important than that in direct cooling conditions. Taking into account of the comparatively good perpendicular eld effects of the YBCO tape, it can be concluded that YBCO tape is more in favor of application in the HTS generators than the BSCCO tape, especially in the high air gap eld and ironless structures. As shown in Fig. 3, investigations in the short tape samples up to and up to 2 s showed in at over-currents with principle 3 types of responses which signicantly depending

LI et al.: RACETRACK EXCITATION COIL IN A NOVEL HIGH TEMPERATURE SUPERCONDUCTING GENERATOR

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TABLE II DESIGN PARAMETERS OF THE TEST COIL

Fig. 4. Comparison of the resistancetime correlation at different cooling conditions measured in (a) 1 G tape and (b) 2 G tape.

on , , and the cooling conditions. In quasi-adiabatic cases, while , the recovery to the superconducting state in the tape is immediate after the over-current pulse, with only slight rising of the temperature and the resistance. Essentially, responses measured in this case show obvious reentry the into the superconducting state within the period of the applied AC pulses, which introduces shoulders [8] in the voltage waveform as shown in Fig. 3. This indicates the heat is not accumulating in the tape. The reason of the phenomenon can be the low resistance of the sheath metal in the tape, as at long pulse durations up to 2 s, the temperature and resistance of the sample is slowly but continuously rising. , as shown in Fig. 3, the shoulWhile correlation curves are less obvious compared ders in the to that in the former case, and the recovery time is comparatively , , and the cooling condilong. In this case, depending on tions, the recovery time can be ranged from several ms to 10 s, and the maximum temperature in the tape is up to 200 K measured by the thermal couple installed on the tape surface at the middle part of the sample. Nevertheless, the tape is able to return to the superconducting state with the working current, demonstrates the over-current tolerance of HTS tape. Furthermore, in synchronous generators, at load uctuation, the pulsed current applied to the excitation coil of the rotor is commonly caused by the large electromotive force divided by the comparatively small coil resistance. As shown in Fig. 4, the resistance in the superconducting coil increases obviously and quickly at the occurring of the over-current, which makes it acting as a current limiter to the pulsed current and can protect itself against the continuous heating up at overload. Hence, the overload tolerance of the HTS generator can be enhanced via careful optimizing of the tape alignments and the coil parameters, including modifying the thermal capacity and conductivity of the coil, adjusting the cooling conditions, and setting the ratio of the working and the . This is essential to the wide applications critical current, of HTS wind turbines because the load is frequently uctuating. , the recovery of the tape becomes difcult. While It may take very long time (up to several minutes) to recover or become irrecoverable. At very large over-currents, for example, , and long pulse durations, for example, , the tape would be directly burnt during the pulse. In this case, the only method to protect the coil is cutting off the working current and demagnetization. To avoid burning caused by over-current, sensors were installed at each ends in each of the excitation coils to monitor the current and voltage across them. The outputs of

the sensors were sent to the circuit breaker and the demagnetization devices. In this work, same sensor system was also used to detect quench and thermal runaway in the coils. In directly cooled cases, similar types of responses were also detected, whereas the boundaries of the 3 types shifted to and , respectively. On the other hand, the boundaries of response types are applicable to both YBCO and BSCCO tapes. The results were in qualitative agreement with the reported overload properties of HTS generators [4], [6]. So, a crude but quantitative prediction of the overload tolerance in the coil can be made according to the results. This can be referential in the future development of large HTS wind turbine generators. IV. TEST COIL DESIGN AND WINDING Although experimental results against over-currents and properties at magnetic elds are in favor of using YBCO tapes, the BSCCO tape manufactured by AMSC was used here to wind the rst 1:1 sized demonstration coil in the 100 kW prototype model because the YBCO tape is still comparatively expensive. Based on the conceptual design shown in Fig. 2, the design parameters of the test coil were decided and listed in Table II. Compared to the conceptual design, the dimensions of the test coil were slightly modied considering the larger thickness and width of BSCCO tape. According to measured in this tape, which was 125 A, the designed working current was taken was 80%. as 100 A, and the ratio To check the feasibility of the proposed ironless structure, the eld distribution around the coil was evaluated using the modied parameters and the above mentioned FEM tools. The results are shown in Fig. 5. From the calculation, it is shown that the magnetic eld generated at the geometry center of the coil was only 0.14 T, while the eld perpendicular to the tape surface close to the windings was 0.4 T, at which of the BSCCO tape scales down to nearly zero. Further simulations showed that coupling of several racetrack coils in certain geometry can help reduce the eld perpendicular to the tape surface and enhance the eld at the center, but the resulting perpendicular eld was still larger than 0.3 T. Hence, iron core was used in the rotor to limit the perpendicular eld to below 0.2 T for using BSCCO tape. Fig. 6 shows the simulation results of the ux distribution in the y-z cross-section of the racetrack coil, from which the eld perpendicular to the surface of the tape close to the windings can be clearly seen. By lowering the working temperature, of BSCCO tape at perpendicular eld can be improved [6], while tapes also have good properties at high perYBCO and pendicular elds. These may help to overcome the eld distribution problems and ironless superconducting generators with

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Fig. 5. Numerical simulation results of the eld distribution in the test coil, along (a) x, (b) y, and (c) z directions, respectively. Fig. 7. Experimental E

0 I result of the test coil.

the coil and no degradation were detected from the following measurements, proving its overload stability. VI. CONCLUSION A conceptual design of 100 kW HTS wind turbine generator was proposed with the rotor consisting of 20 pairs of HTS racetrack coils and a conventional stator. Structures with and without the iron core were considered and the eld distributions was numerically evaluated. The stability against over-currents of the tapes proposed to use in the generator were investigated and the result was in favor of variable load applications in the wind farms. 1:1 sized test coils using BSCCO tape were wound imaccording to the conceptual design and tested in liquid mersion. The results show 20% degradation of the critical current due to winding damages. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors thank Professor G. M. Zhang and Dr. Y. G. Zhou from Institute of Electrical Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences for the discussions concerning the over-current properties of the HTS tapes and ac losses. REFERENCES
[1] American Superconductor Corp., Press Release, Feb. 10, 2009. [2] M. K. Al-Mosawi, C. Beduz, K. Goddard, J. K. Sykulski, Y. Yang, B. Xu, K. S. Ship, R. Stoll, and N. G. Stephen, Design of a 100 kVA high temperature superconducting demonstration synchronous generator, Physica C, vol. 372276, pp. 15391542, 2002. [3] R. Pei, A. Velichko, M. Majoros, Y. Jiang, R. Viznichenko, Z. Hong, R. Marchant, A. M. Campbell, and T. A. Coombs, Ic and AC loss of 2G YBCO tape measurement for designing and fabrication of an HTS motor, IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercond., vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 12361239, Jun. 2008. [4] J. Frauenhofer, M. Kaufhold, P. Kummeth, G. Nerowski, and W. Nick, High temperature superconducting machinesA high-technology step for large rotating electric machines, in Int. Symp. Power Electron., Electr.Drives, Autom. Motion, IEEE, 2006, pp. S16-12S16-16. [5] Y. G. Zhou, G. M. Zhang, X. H. Li, Y. S. Wang, L. Z. Lin, and L. Y. Xiao, Performance of YBa Cu O tapes with different structures under AC over current conditions, IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercond., vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 36653669, Jun. 2009. [6] B. A. Shoykhet and S. D. Umans, Quench in HTS motor eld coils: Reduced temperature modeling of HTS tapes, IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercond., vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 35033508, Jun. 2007. [7] Z.-M. Bai, X. Wu, C.-L. Wu, and J.-X. Wang, Quench propagation properties analysis of high-temperature superconductors using nite element method, Physica C, vol. 436, pp. 99102, 2006. [8] S.-W. Yim, S.-H. Lim, H.-R. Kim, S.-D. Hwang, and K. Kishio, Electrical behavior of Bi-2223/Ag tapes under applied alternating over-currents, IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercond., vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 24822487, Jun. 2005.

Fig. 6. Simulated ux distributions in the y-z cross-section of the test coil.

the eld at the air gap higher than the saturation eld of iron could be then achieved. Finally, the test racetrack coil was wound according to the parameters listed in Table II. At winding, the tapes were rstly wrapped by 3 layers of Kapton lm for electrical insulation. The thickness of each layer of the lm was 0.01 mm. To protect the tape, the tension at winding was continuously monitored and kept below 100 N. To wind the double pancake coil, the tape was rstly mounted to the epoxy resin framework at the middle and simultaneity wound towards both ends. For each coil, 6.1 m tape was used. Low temperature epoxy DW-3 with AlN powder : 1 was coated additions at the weight ratio of epoxy: between the frame and the tape, as well as on each turns of the tape during the winding process. After that, the coil was heated for 1 h to help solidifying the epoxy. This is both up to 60 benecial to the mechanic strength and the thermal conductivity in the coil. As the straight part of the coil tends to bump up, additional reinforcement made of one layer of Kapton lm with 0.05 mm in thickness and 30 mm in width was applied across the middle of the coil after winding. V. PRELIMINARY TEST characteristics and After winding and solidifying, the the eld distributions of the test coil were measured in liquid immersion, and the obtained curves are shown in Fig. 7. According to the 1 criteria, the critical current of the coil is 96 A, which is slightly smaller than the designed working current. The degradation of in the coil is tentatively attributed to the damages during winding. The eld distribution was then measured at the working current of 80 A using Hall sensors. The results show the eld at the center of the coil was 0.12 T, while the maximum perpendicular eld at the outer side of the windings was 0.17 T. Pulsed AC currents with and , respectively, and duration were applied to