AC losses in a flexible 10 m long conductor model for a HTS power transmission cable

To demonstrate the possibility of manufacturing a HTS power transmission cable with low AC losses, we fabricated a 10 m long cable conductor and a cryosystem. The conductor was wound in a four-layer design out of 2 km Ag/Bi-2223 tapes. We determined a critical current of 5000 A. Loss measurements were performed with an electric method which detects the voltage drop along the conductor with a lock-in technique and a calorimetric method which measures the temperature rise along the conductor. Both methods yield the same low loss values of only 0.8 W/m at 77 K and 2000 A(rms)/50 Hz. This is due to the low loss winding scheme we used which assures an equal current distribution in all four layers through transformatoric coupling. We applied the uniform current distribution model and added the nonlinear V-l curve to describe quantitatively the obtained results. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.