AC loss in a tri-axial HTS cable with balanced current distribution

High temperature superconductor (HTS) cables have been studied because they are more compact compared to conventional copper cables. In power applications of HTS cable AC loss is significantly important, as it is related with capacity and efficiency of the power line. Recently, a tri-axial cable composed of three concentric phases has been intensively developed, because of their reduced amount of HTS tapes, small leakage field, low heat loss when compared to three coaxial HTS cable. However, it experiences additional losses and large leakage field due to inherent imbalanced currents. Inside the tri-axial cable, each phase is subject to out-of-phase magnetic fields formed by other phase layer currents. Because tapes are twisted on successive layers, axial field by outer layers and azimuthal field by inner layers are produced in a tri-axial HTS cable. Any slab in the cable experiences parallel component of magnetic field on the wide faces of the tapes: induced by currents of all layers. Since the fields on tapes generate magnetization losses, they should be calculated in consideration of the balanced current distribution of the tri-axial cable. In this paper, AC loss in the tri-axial HTS cable consisting of one layer per phase is described, theoretically, where the balanced phase current distribution is satisfied through treating two different cable segments. The average AC losses in the cable are calculated as functions of the segment lengths and the segment twist pitches. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.