Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

In developed countries, expansion of power systems becomes more challenging every year. Power flows get closer to their limits, high levels of short-circuit currents make the addition of production near urban centers complicated, lack of space in urban centers lead to bottlenecks, etc. Deep changes to current network architecture associated to new technological solutions are expected to be the only way to avoid the elevated social costs associated to a reduction in reliability of electric supply. High temperature superconductors (HTS) are among the most promising technologies. Indeed, HTS apparatus are smaller for the same output power and possess a higher overloading capability than conventional equipment. They can be used in retrofit installations to solve congested networks problems for tens of years. In addition, the inherent nonlinear properties of superconductors make them natural fault current limiters. This opens the door to new and more reliable network architectures, such as highly meshed networks. The main goal of this project is to increase the range of validity of HTS resistivity models to higher current densities, for a wide range of temperatures and fields, in order to cover the whole transition region between the critical current and the normal state. This would make possible the optimization by numerical simulations of new superconducting apparatus (limiters, cables, transformers), which is a key issue for getting realistic performances of prototypes by numerical simulations under arbitrary conditions. Achieving this objective would be a considerable contribution to the discipline. The major requirement to ensure international significance of this work is to obtain the relevant lab equipement to realize the experimental part. This equipement is a split pair magnet with a variable temperature cryostat for the sample holder. The current proposal describes the need for the above equipement and justifies it. Note that the above work is part of applicant's research program, which is already funded by a NSERC discovery grant.