Discontinuous Galerkin Spectral Element Simulation of a Thermal-Hydraulic Problem in Superconducting Magnets

Abstract

In this article we simulate one-dimensional quench propagation in superconducting magnets using cable-in-conduit conductors (CICCs) by a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) spectral element method (SEM) and explicit Runge-Kutta time integration. The supercritical helium flow in the CICC channel can be described by the Euler equations with an additional friction force and coupled heat transfer among the helium, the conductor, and the conduit. Roe's approximate Riemann solver for a real gas=fluid is used to compute numerical flux, and a nonreflecting boundary condition is introduced for the approximation of the outflow boundary condition. The method used here is highly parallelizable. Some numerical results are given and compared with those obtained by a finite-element method and with experimental data. This method shows high robustness to simulate the thermal-hydraulic problem with large nonlinear source terms.