Applied Electromagnetics Using QuickField and MATLAB

Section 8.5 - Superconductivity: Superconducting Geometries and Boundary Conditions

Geometric Effects

Type-I superconductors, such as lead, become normal in magnetic fields greater than the thermodynamic critical fieldwhich decreases with increasing temperature. For fields sufficiently weaker than flux is completely expelled from the bulk of the sample, except for a thin surface layer of about 50 nm. The expelled field results in larger flux densities near the edges of the superconductor. Demagnetization occurs in nearly critical fields, where the local field strength exceeds resulting in an intermediate state with coexisting superconducting and normal regions. The interface between these superconducting and normal regions will have a complex geometry that tends to minimize the total energy of the system.

Nonlinear Superconductors

Type-II superconductors such as Nb3Sn are characterized by two critical fields and Flux is expelled from the superconductor below and the sample becomes normal above Between these field values, the superconductor is penetrated by flux vortices each with a normal core threaded by one flux quantum For magnetic fields strengths greater than the nonlinear B(H) characteristics need to be accounted for. For high field applications such as magnetic resonance imaging, accelerator magnets and fault current limiters, the nonlinear B(H) curve is entered in as a data file that is used by the solver during the calculation of the resulting field distribution.

Boundary Conditions

Calculations in this chapter will neglect field penetrations into the superconductor entirely. This approximation is valid if the dimensions of the superconductor are much larger thanIn modeling superconductors, where demagnetization effects do not occur, the appropriate boundary condition is zero normal flux density on the superconducting surface. This boundary condition can be applied explicitly by forcing Bn = 0 on all superconducting surfaces, or implicitly by choosing the relatively permeability of the superconductor to be nearly zero.

Calculation of Supercurrent Density

Once the field is calculated, the supercurrent density at the surface of the superconductor may be determined by the discontinuity in the tangential component of the field strength

FIGURE 8.1 Finite element mesh of a superconducting bowl modeled in x-y coordinates.

Mesh Requirements

Greater computational accuracy is desired in regions with large spatial field variations near the superconductor than at remote parts of the solution region, where the field is slowly varying. This is accomplished with a finer finite element mesh, where an accurate determination of the field distribution is required and a coarser mesh in remote regions. Adaptive mesh refinement may be used to adjust the node spacing depending on the variation of energy density in a particular region. Figure 8.1 is a FEM mesh exterior to a superconducting bowl. The mesh grading is apparent in this figure with a finer mesh near the bowl. Roughly 1/10 of the solution region is shown. Note that, in the linear case, it is not necessary to mesh interior regions of the superconductor, where the fields are taken to be zero.

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