Design and cooling characteristic results of cryogenic system for 6.6 kV/200 A inductive fault current limiter

Abstract

The conduction-cooled cryogenic cooling system for 1.2 kV/80 A inductive Superconducting Fault Current Limiter (SFCL) was fabricated and tested for its cooling characteristics in 2002. The observed thermal stability of the conduction-cooled system was very unreliable and precarious for the applied superconducting equipment with very large variation of currents like SFCL. Therefore, we replaced the conduction-cooled system with the sub-cooled nitrogen system for the 6.6 kV/200 A SFCL. In this paper, the design techniques and test results of cooling characteristics were introduced. The conditions for achieving the sub-cooled nitrogen state were 1 atm and 64 K. First, the temperature of 64 K was achieved by using the rotary pump and then the pressure of 1 atm was achieved by GHe. The characteristics of liquid nitrogen were strongly enhanced in these conditions. This fabricated cryogenic system merely for the short run operation test SFCL. Finally, the cryogenic system for the long run operation test SFCL was introduced.