Investigation on AC loss of a high temperature superconducting tri-axial cable depending on twist pitches

High temperature superconductor (HTS) cables have been intensively studied because they are more compact compared with conventional copper cables. Since it is strongly expected that the HTS cables replace conventional power lines, some HTS cables are designed, manufactured, installed in power grids and tested to demonstrate full time operation. Recently, a tri-axial cable composed of three concentric phases has been developed, because of its reduced amount of HTS tapes, small leakage field and low heat loss when compared with single phase and co-axial HTS cables. The layers inside the tri-axial cable are subject to azimuthal fields applied from inner layers and axial fields applied from outer layers with different phase from their transport currents. These out-of-phase magnetic fields should be calculated under the condition of the three phase-balanced distribution of the tri-axial cable, and thereby AC losses should be evaluated. In this paper, the AC loss in the tri-axial HTS cable consisting of one layer per phase is theoretically treated for simplicity. The AC losses in the cable are calculated as functions of the twist pitches of HTS tapes. It is found that the AC losses rapidly decrease with increasing twist pitch. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.