Research activities of DC Superconducting Power Transmission Line in Chubu University

A experiment of a DC Superconducting power transmission line using HTS conductor was started in Chubu University, Japan in autumn 2006. The first cooling down began in October 2006. The coolant is liquid nitrogen, and the cooling system used a cryogenic cooler and cold pump. The operation temperature is the range of 72 K -80 K. The power cable has a total length of 20 m, and composed of thirty-nine Bi-2223 HTS tape conductors with critical current approximately100 A. The power cable achieved a 2.2 kA. The insulation voltage of the cable is 20 kV. In order to reduce the heat leakage and to avoid the current imbalance in the HTS tapes, we installed the Pelteir Current Lead (PCL) for each of the nineteen HTS tapes of the cable, with remaining twenty HTS tapes connected individually by the usual copper leads (CCL). Depending on the visual observation, and the measurement of temperatures of the current leads, the heat leakage of the PCL is lower than that of CCL. We installed a current transformer for each individual HTS tape conductor circuit, and measured the current of each HTS tape conductor. We measured the critical current of each HTS tape after the cable was installed into the cryostat, and degradation was not observed. Since the variation of the current in each tape is less than 10%, we eliminated the problem of current imbalance. Computational Fluid Dynamics is used to estimate the pressure drop, showing that the straight-tube cryostat has the advantage against the bellows-and corrugated-tube cryostats to reduce the pressure drop of the circulation of coolant. We proposed further to use the siphon for circulating the coolant in order to reduce the circulation losses and costs. We proposed that the voltage of the system be kept below 30 kV in order to use low cost power inverters. This choice can increase the storage energy of the power transmission line itself if we do not use a co-axial cable system because of it allows use of large current. And the magnetic energy of power grid is estimated to 4.5MJ/km for +/- 30 kA.