The development of accelerator magnets able to produce magnetic fields beyond those attained in the main magnets of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) requires the use of conductors with enhanced superconducting properties with respect to the well-known Nb-Ti technology. In the present days, Nb3Sn has become the preferred choice for the windings of such new high-field designs, thanks to its proven large-scale industrial production. Laboratory experiments, which range from tests on single wires up to full cables, have shown that the critical current of Nb3Sn conductors depends on the applied mechanical loads. However, it results very difficult to find a correlation among measurements on single wires (or cables) and data from superconducting coils in magnet configuration.
Our work reports on the results of an experimental and numerical modelling campaign devoted to understand the electro-mechanical limits of the novel MQXF quadrupoles. These magnets will be the first Nb3Sn units to be installed in a particle accelerator as a part of the High Luminosity upgrade of the LHC. On-going tests carried out in a short magnet model (MQXFS7) have confirmed the correct magnet performance up to compressive stress levels in the coils, at cryogenic temperature, in the order of 160 MPa and possibly beyond. These results in magnet configuration are compared here with independent single-wire tests performed in a dedicated experiment at the University of Geneva. The study exploits Finite Element (FE) models reproducing both configurations to provide a complete insight into the physics of the problem.