Limiting Short-circuit Current with a 10 kVA Superconducting Transformer

Limiting short-circuit current with a superconducting transformer may turn out to be the most important advantage of the replacement of copper windings with superconducting ones. Second generation superconducting tapes allow to construct transformer with high short-circuit durability. Appropriate design and tested construction of a superconducting device may be able to reduce surge current in time less than 5 ms. This can help to guard the transformer itself against destructive dynamic forces, provide an additional protection and significantly lower wear-out of the switches and other power equipment. To support the transformer design process, this paper proposes the circuit model of superconducting transformer implemented in PSpice. With this model it was possible to calculate electrical waveforms and winding temperatures in a single-phase superconducting transformer.