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Due to the rapid development of cryocoolers, conduction-cooled Nb3Sn devices are nowadays enabled. A 0.2 MJ conduction-cooled Nb3Sn SMES system has been designed and constructed. The nominal current of the coil was 275 A at 10 K. The quench tests have been performed and in this paper the experimental data are compared to the computational one. Due to a slow normal zone propagation, Nb3Sn magnets are not necessarily self-protective. In conduction-cooled coils, a thermal interface provides a protection method known as a quench back. The temperature rise in the coil during a quench was measured with a sensor located on the inner radius of the coil. The current decay was also monitored. The measured temperature increased for approximately 15 s after the current had already decayed. This temperature rise is due to the heat conduction from the hot spot. Thus, the measured temperature does not represent the hot-spot temperature. A computational quench model which takes into account quench back and heat conduction after the current decay was developed in order to understand the measured temperatures. According to the results, a quench back due to the eddy current induced heating of the thermal interface of an LTS coil was an adequate protection method.

During the last five years, the ac performance of high temperature superconductor (HTS) tapes has been under intense development due to the need of practical applications. In order to measure and understand the current density distributions inside these tapes, several methods have already been developed. However, no system has been able to give the time dependent, spatial distribution of the magnetic flux density at a selected distance above the HTS tape carrying any cyclic current signal. In this paper, such a system operating at a frequency range of 0–400 Hz is presented, and possible error sources are extensively investigated. Post-processing of the measured data is explained in detail and error analysis of several example measurements is given. Measurements with HTS and copper samples are compared in order to demonstrate the usefulness of the system.

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