Speaker
Description
High-temperature Rare-Earth Barium Copper Oxide superconductor tapes are considered for devices with time-varying magnetic fields, which means they will be affected by cyclic mechanical loading and AC losses. A recent trend for lowering the AC loss of REBCO tapes is filamentization. The influence of filamentization on the mechanical strength of REBCO tapes is being actively investigated – both via measurements and numerical modelling. However, due to the variance in inherent tape properties and the multi-layer structure of the tapes, it is not trivial to predict how in-depth numerical modelling should be for future predictions for cable or magnet design. To answer this question, we performed measurements on several non-filamented commercial tapes and two filamented non-commercial tapes to observe the difference in the behaviour, when subjected to mechanical loading. Numerical modelling was used to evaluate the resulting strain after mechanical loading for the non-filamented tapes. From the first results, we observed similar mechanical robustness for both tape types, suggesting that numerical models could be simplified to save computing time. On the other hand, local defects seem to play an important role also for mechanical behaviour, and the impact of filamentization on long-length homogeneity of tapes should be explored.
