658 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON APPLIED SUPERCONDUCTIVITY, VOL. 14, NO.

2, JUNE 2004

Fault Current Characteristics in a Technical

High Tc Superconductor
K. Ryu, S. W. Kim, B. J. Choi, and S. D. Hwang

Abstract—A Bi-2223 tape has been developed for low-field

power applications such as power cables or transformers working
at liquid nitrogen temperature. For such applications it is required
to understand fault current characteristics of the technical high
temperature (Tc ) superconductor.
In this paper, we prepared two types of the samples with sim-
ilar insulation structures to power cables and transformers: the
straight sample and the pancake sample. Then we examined the
normal transition characteristics for a sinusoidal steady current
and the fault current characteristics for a sinusoidal pulse cur-
rent. It is found that temperatures slightly higher than critical one
of the technical high Tc superconductor make normal transition
easily. However over-critical currents can’t make it normal state
completely up to 5 if the superconductor’s temperature re-
mains bath one. The fault current tests show that the temperatures
and resistances measured in both the insulated straight sample and
the pancake sample with conductor insulation are similar to each
other, while the pancake sample with layer insulation is signifi-
cantly different from the two samples above. This means that from
damage point of view under the grid’s fault conditions, the pancake Fig. 1. Schematic of the samples. a) Straight sample; b) pancake sample.
sample with layer insulation has better characteristic in compar-
ison with conductor insulation. TABLE I
SPECIFICATIONS OF A Bi-2223 TAPE
Index Terms—Fault current, normal transition, sinusoidal
steady current, straight and pancake sample.

I. INTRODUCTION

I N AN ELECTRIC grid, there is a certain possibility of a fault

current, which is sometimes tens of times the grid’s nom-
inal current. Its duration also ranges from 3 cycles to 5 cycles
were also examined to reflect reliability of the high
conductor under the conditions of the grid’s fault.
super-

because of an intrinsic characteristic in an ac circuit breaker,

though it depends on the grid’s voltage. A Bi-2223 tape, which
is frequently applied to power devices such as power cables and
transformers, heats up because the fault current is usually very
large compared to its critical current [1]–[3]. Thus the technical
high temperature superconductor should be safe for these
fault conditions.
In this work, we first investigated the normal transition char-
acteristics of the high superconductor for a sinusoidal steady
current. In addition, its behaviors for a sinusoidal pulse current
Manuscript received October 20, 2003. This work was supported by a grant
from the Electric Power Industry Technology Evaluation & Planning Office
funded by Korea Electric Power Corporation and the Ministry of Commerce,
Industry and Energy of Korea.
K. Ryu is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Chonnam National
University, Kwangju 500-757, Korea (e-mail: kwryu@chonnam.ac.kr).
S. W. Kim is with the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute (e-mail:
swkim@keri.re.kr).
B. J. Choi is with Sorabol College, Kyongju 780-711, Korea (e-mail: bj-
choi@sorabol.ac.kr).
S. D. Hwang is with Korea Electric Power Corporation (e-mail: sd-
hwang@kepri.re.kr).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TASC.2004.830020
1051-8223/04$20.00 © 2004 IEEE
II. EXPERIMENT
Two kinds of test samples were prepared, taking into account
the actual insulation structures of a power cable and a trans-
former. One is a straight sample composed of a technical high
superconductor placed between a Kapton film and a Bake-
lite former, which is similar to the cable from insulation point
of view. The other is a pancake sample, which is similar to the
transformer’s winding. Their schematics are depicted in Fig. 1.
A multifilamentary Bi-2223 tape was used as a conductor for
the samples shown in Fig. 1. Its parameters are summarized in
Table I. All the samples were insulated with the Kapton film
0.05 mm in thickness and 10 mm in width. In order to fabricate
the pancake sample, five turns of the Bi-2223 tape were wound
on a FRP bobbin of 88 mm in diameter and 60 mm in height.
To measure the conductor’s temperature, an E-type thermo-
couple with the diameter of 0.13 mm was tightly attached to
the conductor surface as shown in Fig. 1. An interface between
the conductor surface and the thermocouple was coated very
thin by a low temperature epoxy in order to insulate the ther-
mocouple from the conductor electrically. Moreover, a voltage

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RYU et al.: FAULT CURRENT CHARACTERISTICS IN A TECHNICAL HIGH
Fig. 2. Experimental setup.
Fig. 3. Typical tap voltage and temperature traces for a sinusoidal pulse
current.
tap (edge tap) soldered to edges of the conductor was used for
the measurement of resistance because it has much smaller in-
ductive voltage in comparison with other kinds of voltage taps
such as rectangular voltage taps [4]. The distance between taps
is 70 mm in all the samples. From measured voltages, we can
define the conductor’s resistance for sinusoidal currents as the
ratio of voltage to current; the voltage is the first harmonic in
phase with the sinusoidal current. Two kinds of currents, sinu-
soidal steady and pulse currents, were used in the investigation
of normal transition and fault current characteristics. The cur-
rents were provided by a 300 A, 20 V power supply. Their fre-
quencies range from 60 Hz to 360 Hz. The experimental setup
is shown in Fig. 2. Fig. 3 shows typical voltage and temperature
traces for a sinusoidal pulse current of 100 cycles. All tempera-
tures and resistances measured in this work are those at a max-
imum temperature. Measurements were carried out in a liquid
nitrogen temperature.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
A. Sinusoidal Steady Current
To investigate the current-driven transition characteristics of
a Bi-2223 tape, first resistance and temperature rise of a straight
sample without insulation were measured for sinusoidal steady
currents with several frequencies including direct current (DC).
They are shown in Fig. 4. The indicates the self-field crit-
ical current of the Bi-2223 tape shown in Table I. The open
and filled symbols indicate measured resistances and temper-
ature rises, respectively. The solid line is the tape’s resistance
per unit length calculated at 77 K. During this calculation, we
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SUPERCONDUCTOR 659
Fig. 4. Temperature rise and resistance vs. normalized over-critical current in
the noninsulated straight sample.
Fig. 5. Temperature rise and resistance vs. normalized over-critical current for
various insulation lengths in the insulated straight samples.
used for the resistivity of Ag matrix in the
Bi-2223 tape [5]. As illustrated in Fig. 4, the tape’s tempera-
tures do not change even if an over-critical current increases up
to . However the measured resistances suddenly increase
and then reach the constant value at , which well agrees
with the calculated resistance at 77 K. This implies that all the
current in the tape flows through the Ag matrix over .
For the transition characteristics of the Bi-2223 tape driven
by both current and temperature, three straight samples, cov-
ered by Kapton films with different insulation lengths of 35 mm,
70 mm, and 100 mm as shown in Fig. 1(a), were prepared and
examined. The measured temperature and resistance of the in-
sulated straight samples are plotted in Fig. 5. As evidenced from
Fig. 5, the resistances increase over the whole range of over-crit-
ical currents: for , the resistance is due to the only
over-critical current, while it is due to both the current and the
temperature rise for . It can be also seen from
Fig. 5 that the measured temperature and resistance depend on
the insulation length in the straight sample. However if it be-
comes longer than the distance between voltage taps, they be-
come similar regardless of the insulation length. On the basis
of the results above, the insulation length in all our samples is
chosen as 100 mm, which is longer than the voltage tap distance
of 70 mm.
660 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON APPLIED SUPERCONDUCTIVITY, VOL. 14, NO. 2, JUNE 2004

Fig. 6. Temperature rise and resistance vs. normalized over-critical current in Fig. 7. Temperature rise and resistance vs. normalized over-critical current for
the insulated straight sample. several pulse durations in the insulated straight sample.

Fig. 6 shows the measured temperature and resistance of the

straight sample with the insulation length of 100 mm. The solid
line indicates the calculated resistances. In this calculation, we
considered the temperature dependence of resistance in Ag ma-
trix based on [5]. The dotted line indicates the difference be-
tween the critical temperature, , of a Bi-2223 superconductor
and the bath one. It can be seen from Fig. 6 that in the temper-
ature range of lower than , the difference between measured
and calculated resistances is very large. This means that the only
over-critical currents slightly larger than can’t make transi-
tion completely from superconducting state to normal state in a
technical high superconductor. However the measured resis-
tance is in good agreement with the calculated one if tempera-
ture becomes higher than . This indicates that in contrast to
the currents, the temperatures slightly higher than can easily
change the high superconductor to normal state. Thus it is
concluded that normal transition in the technical high super-
conductor strongly depends on the temperature rather than the
over-critical current.

B. Sinusoidal Pulse Current

For the fault current characteristics of the Bi-2223 tape, three
samples, which have different insulation structures from one an-
other, were fabricated. Their temperature rises and resistances
were measured for various pulse durations.
Fig. 7 illustrates the measured temperature and resistance of
the insulated straight sample. The data measured for a sinu-
soidal steady current are also plotted for comparison with the
results measured for a sinusoidal pulse current. For the pulse
current with 5 cycles, the measured resistance increases and then
reaches the one calculated at 77 K because the temperature re-
mains constant as shown in Fig. 4. However it can be also seen
from Fig. 7 that both temperature and resistance increase sud-
denly as the number of cycles in the pulse current becomes tens
of cycles. The measured temperature and resistance for the pulse
current with 100 cycles are very small in comparison with those
for the sinusoidal steady current.
We also examined the two pancake samples, which have
similar insulation structures to a power transformer: one is the
sample with conductor insulation in which an insulating film
is helically wrapped along the conductor’s axis and the other
Fig. 8. Temperature rise and resistance vs. normalized over-critical current for
various pulse durations in the pancake samples.
is that with layer insulation in which the insulating film is
inserted between layers in a pancake. Fig. 8 shows the measured
temperatures and resistances for different pulse durations in the
pancake samples. The temperatures and resistances measured
for the pancake sample with conductor insulation are similar
to those in the insulated straight sample as shown in Fig. 7.
However in the pancake sample with layer insulation, the
temperatures do not change even up to and remain the
bath temperature of 77 K. Therefore the measured resistances
also are similar to those in the noninsulated straight sample as
illustrated in Fig. 4. This is due to lateral cooling through both

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RYU et al.: FAULT CURRENT CHARACTERISTICS IN A TECHNICAL HIGH
edges of a technical high superconductor, which are not
insulated by Kapton films. As evidenced from Fig. 8, from a
conductor temperature point of view for fault currents it seems
that the pancake sample with layer insulation is more excellent
compared to that with conductor insulation.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this work we prepared two kinds of the samples having
similar insulation structures to power cables and transformers:
the straight sample and the pancake sample. The normal tran-
sition characteristics for a sinusoidal steady current and fault
current characteristics for a sinusoidal pulse current were inves-
tigated experimentally. The steady current tests show that tran-
sition to normal state in a Bi-2223 tape is not made completely
by over-critical currents of up to if a conductor’s temper-
ature remains bath one. However it easily becomes normal state
even at the temperature slightly higher than its critical one of
110 K. The temperatures and resistances for the pulse currents
measured in both the insulated straight sample and the pancake
sample with conductor insulation are similar to each other, while
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SUPERCONDUCTOR 661
the pancake sample with layer insulation has significantly dif-
ferent characteristics from the previous two samples. This im-
plies that from the conductor’s temperature point of view, the
pancake sample with layer insulation is more excellent in com-
parison with conductor insulation.
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