Electric measurement of the critical current, AC loss, and current distribution of a prototype HTS cable

HTS cable is an emerging technology for electricity power transmission. It is very important to set up an accurate and easy-to-build measurement system to characterize HTS cables. In this paper, a novel measurement system has been developed to measure the ac losses for a prototype HTS cable using cancelation coil technique. This system is based on the National Instrument Data Acquisition card. It can also be used to measure the critical current and current distribution in the prototype cable. The prototype cable has been innovatively designed using an improved particle swarm optimization algorithm which is more computationally efficient than conventional methods. The measurement system will be improved further by introducing an elaborate pre-amplifier prior to data collection process and the result will be compared with theoretical calculations for validation.