Modeling of Thermal Quench in Superconducting RF Cavities

Superconducting radio frequency (SRF) cavities are often limited by thermal quench, which is an excessive electromagnetic heating that occurs in the high magnetic field area and expands thereafter forcing the cavity to lose its superconducting state. In this article, we demonstrate how the quench phenomena can be modeled using a coupled electromagnetic thermal analysis. The proposed model takes into account the nonlinearity of the material properties at cryogenic temperature and the effect of Kapitza resistance. The proposed approach is used to compute the thermal quench field of a 3.9-GHz 9-cell accelerating cavity, a 2.815-GHz deflecting cavity, and a 1.3-GHz 9-cell accelerating cavity. The computed values of quench field are in good agreement with the measured ones observed during vertical testing at 2 K. Without loss of generality, the proposed methodology can be applied to other cavity geometries.