Experimental and Simulation Study for Resistive Helical HTS Fault Current Limiter: Quench and Recovery Characteristics

Resistive type fault current limiters (SFCLs) have attracted lots of attention from research interests and engineering applications, thanks to its self-triggering, fast and effective fault current limita-tion ability. Fast recovery of SFCL after quench is highly ex-pected, yet still remains rigorous when recovering with load, as compared to recovering without load. In this work, we investigat-ed the dependence of recovery time of a helical SFCL coil on the ratio of Ipros/ Ic. A multilayer simulation model was built in Matlab/Simulink to explore the electrothermal behavior of SFCL coil during a fault and recovery period, and the model was vali-dated by experimental results. Quench tests were carried out un-der different Ipros/ Ic, ranging from 15 to 119 and in different re-covery modes including recover with load mode and recover without load mode, while keeping the fault duration of 100 ms. We observed that the SFCL coil reached 85 K and 195 K at the time when the fault was cleared, in the quench tests with Ipros/ Ic = 15 and 119, respectively. SFCL coil recovered without load in 0.5 s to 10 s, depending on the ratio of Ipros/ Ic.