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Description
High-temperature superconducting (HTS) cables are promising candidates for compact and efficient high-power electrical transmission, owing to their high current-carrying capability and negligible ohmic losses under superconducting operating conditions. However, in applications involving relatively short cable lengths, such as urban power links, railway infrastructures, or embedded electrical systems, the relative contribution of the terminations to the overall thermal budget can become particularly significant. Reducing the heat load associated with HTS cable terminations is therefore a key challenge for improving the efficiency, compactness, and practical relevance of such systems.
This work addresses the steady-state thermo-electrical design problem of HTS cable terminations, which provide the electrical and thermal transition between the ambient-temperature power interface and the cryogenic cable core. Three representative architectures reported in the literature are reviewed and compared: conduction-dominated terminations, terminations cooled by natural convection, and terminations assisted by forced convection. A one-dimensional modelling framework is introduced for the resistive current lead, accounting for axial heat conduction, Joule heating, and, when relevant, convective heat exchange with the cryogenic fluid.
The comparison clearly shows that the cooling mode has a first-order impact on the thermal performance of the termination. For a representative nominal current of 2 kA, the estimated heat load at the cold end decreases from about 90 W for a conduction-dominated design to 39.4 W with natural convection and 16 W with forced convection. While forced convection offers the most effective heat extraction and may enable more compact designs, its benefit must be assessed at system level by including the additional losses, complexity, and integration constraints associated with auxiliary cooling equipment.
The proposed analysis provides a first benchmark for the design of efficient HTS cable terminations and represents an initial step toward a coupled thermo-electrical optimization tool. Future work will extend the model toward two- and three-dimensional multiphysics numerical validation, before progressing in the longer term to experimental assessment on a prototype termination. This will support the development of compact, low-loss and system-efficient terminations for practical HTS cable applications.
| Submitters Country | FRANCE |
|---|---|
| Are you a student? | Yes |
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