Electrothermal Modeling of Coated Conductor for a Resistive Superconducting Fault-Current Limiter

Coated conductors are very promising for the design of a novel and efficient superconducting fault-current limiter (SFCL). The thermal and electrical behaviors of this type of SFCL in the presence of over-critical currents need to be investigated in detail to master its performance in a power grid. In this paper, an Electrothermal Model of a Coated Conductor (ETMCC), not simulated in the literature, is implemented and introduced in the library of MATLAB software. An algorithm to solve the differential equations characterizing the superconducting material is developed using the Runge-Kutta method. In this context the ETMCC under over-critical current is performed. Different dimensions and substrate configurations of the sandwich layers are considered. In order to improve the high-temperature superconductor (HTS)-FCL design, the influence of the substrate and shunted layers (using different materials) on the thermal stability is investigated. The simulation results are generalized, thus allowing us to determine the current threshold to achieve thermal stability of the HTS-FCL at any point of the coated conductor.