Potential and limits of numerical modelling for supporting the development of HTS devices

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state of numerical modelling for high temperature superconductor (HTS) device design, highlighting limitations in performance and data sharing, and suggests paths for improvement.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of existing models, identifies key limitations, and proposes strategies for enhancing numerical methods and data sharing in HTS device modelling.

Findings

Numerical models are limited by performance and data availability.

Sharing of models, data, and documentation is crucial for progress.

Adaptive numerical methods can improve modelling accuracy and efficiency.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a general review of the status of numerical modelling applied to the design of high temperature superconductor (HTS) devices. The importance of this tool is emphasized at the beginning of the paper, followed by formal definitions of the notions of models, numerical methods and numerical models. The state-of-the-art models are listed, and the main limitations of existing numerical models are reported. Those limitations are shown to concern two aspects: one the one hand, the numerical performance (i.e. speed) of the methods themselves is not good enough yet; on the other hand, the availability of model file templates, material data and benchmark problems is clearly insufficient. Paths for improving those elements are provided in the paper. Besides the technical aspects of the research to be further pursued, for instance in adaptive numerical methods, most recommendations command for an increased collective effort for sharing files, data, codes and their documentation.