Magnetic field orientation dependence of critical current in industrial Nb3Sn strands

In usual superconducting devices such as magnets for NMR, the magnetic field is perpendicular to the superconducting strand axis. But in some special devices, such as magnets for the toroidal field system of fusion machines, the strands can experience any field orientation. For NbTi strands, the pinning force is dependent on the field orientation because of the drawing process (Takacs, S., Polak, M. and Krempasky, L., Critical currents of NbTi tapes with differently oriented anisotropic defects, Cryogenics, 1983, 23, 153-159). In the case of Nb,Sn strands, the draw and react process suggests that the pinning force is isotropic. In fact, preliminary experiments have shown the contrary, which is why the magnetic field orientation dependence of the critical current for two types of industrial Nb3Sn strands has been measured. These measurements have been performed for seven field orientations at field strengths up to 20 T. A clear anisotropic effect has been observed, which cannot be explained by Kramer's pinning law. The results are in very good agreement with an empirical law proposed in a recent study by Takayasu et al. (Takayasu, M., Montgomery, D.B. and Minervini, J.V., Effect of magnetic field direction on the critical current of twisted multifilamentary superconducting wires, Inst. of Phys. Conf. Ser., 1997, 158, 917-920). The parameters to be used in this law could be specific to the manufacturing process. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.