Tests on a 6 T conduction-cooled superconducting magnet

A 6 T conduction-cooled superconducting magnet was designed, fabricated and tested. The magnet is composed of two coaxial NbTi solenoid coils with identical axial length. Clear bore of the magnet is phi 226 mm. The magnet is installed in a vacuum cryostat with a phi 100 mm room temperature bore. The cryostat is designed in a support frame to be rotatable in a horizontal or vertical direction. A two-stage 4 K Gifford-McMahon (GM) cryocooler is used to cool down the superconducting magnet from room temperature to 4 K. The cooling power of the 4 K cold head is 1 W. A pair of Bi-2223 high temperature superconducting current leads was employed to reduce heat leakage into 4 K cold mass. Total cold mass of the superconducting magnet is about 115 kg. It takes 82 hours to cool down the magnet from 300 K to 4 K directly through the cryocooler. The superconducting magnet reached the designed central magnetic field of 6 T in the warm bore when a 115 A energizing current is applied. The superconducting magnet was stably operating more than 275 hours continuously in full field. Further, a Nb-3 Sn coil insert to be installed, the magnet can provide the maximum center field of 10 T with effective warm bore of 0 100 mm. In this paper, the detailed design, fabrication and test are presented.