Bi-Filar Coil Winding for Fast Quench Protection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a bifilar coil winding technique to enhance quench protection in superconducting magnets, enabling faster response times and higher di/dt for advanced energy storage systems.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel bifilar coil winding method that reduces inductance limitations and improves quench protection response times in superconducting magnet systems.

Findings

Demonstrated on a small REBCO coil with improved response time.

Achieved extremely high di/dt in coil protection scenarios.

Reduced inductance limitations in large magnet strings.

Abstract

As superconducting magnet technology is pushed towards higher performance, energy density and total stored energy follow exponentially. Protecting magnets becomes substantially more challenging with traditional methods being stretched to their limits. New technologies such as CLIQ (Coupling Loss Induced Quench) promise to provide a robust method to protect advanced magnets, however they become inductance limited in large magnet strings or at low field, leading to more complex configurations. A technique to substantially reduce this limitation and improve response time is presented, by winding coils in a bifilar fashion and connecting them in series for typical operation, while providing an anti-parallel connection for quasi-zero-inductance in a protection case. This allows for extremely high di/dt. The concept is then demonstrated on a small REBCO coil.