Bending of CORC® cables and wires: finite element parametric study and experimental validation

A conductor on round core (CORC®) cable is composed of several layers of helically wound high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tapes on a round core with the winding direction reversed in each successive layer. The cable is flexible but the flexibility is limited by the critical strain value causing breakage of the HTS layer when this strain level is exceeded. The cables for magnets in fusion reactors experience large mechanical and electromagnetic loads. These loads arise from the cabling, coil manufacturing, cooling, and magnet operation. In order to optimize the manufacture and operating conditions, the mechanical behavior of CORC® cables must be understood for the different relevant loading conditions. The cable configuration with many contact interactions between tapes and the non-linear behavior of the materials during the production and operating conditions makes the modeling challenging. Detailed finite element (FE) modeling is required to account for these complexities. The FE modeling allows an accurate calculation of the stress–strain state (SSS) of the cable components under various loads and avoids time-consuming large-scale experimental optimization studies. This work presents a detailed FE modeling of the 3D SSS in a CORC® wire under bending load. The elastic–plastic properties of the individual tape composite materials and its temperature dependence are taken into account. The FE model is experimentally validated by a multilayer CORC® bending test performed by Advanced Conductor Technologies LLC. A critical intrinsic tensile strain value of 0.45% is taken as the threshold where the individual tape performance becomes irreversibly degraded. The proposed FE model describes the bending test of the CORC® wire adequately and thus can be used to study other types of loads. A parametric study is ongoing with dependent variables to pursue a further optimization of CORC® cables and wires for various applications.