Development of an Impedance Matching Program for Balancing the Current Distribution in a Tri-axial HTS Power Cable

The tri-axial high temperature superconducting (HTS) power cable design has several advantages when compared with other HTS power cables. However, this design has an imbalance in the three phase currents, as the phase conductors of the tri-axial HTS power cable have different radii. The radii of the phase conductors impact the value of inductance and capacitance for the cable, and the values are determined by the winding pitch length and the winding direction. Thus, the current imbalance can be minimized through the adjustment of the winding pitch length, the radius of each layer, and the winding direction. It takes a lot of time to manually calculate an impedance and to find a matched impedance. So the impedance of the tri-axial HTS power cable, according to its shape, was analyzed and the impedance matching program (IMP) was developed using LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench) to solve this problem. IMP finds the matching impedance automatically by calculating the impedance according to the tri-axial HTS cable dimension. Consequently, this could save a lot of time, and so this program will be applied to the design of the tri-axial HTS power cable effectively.