A high-performance electromagnetic code to simulate high-temperature superconductors

Superconductivity is a physical phenomenon of some materials that allow them to conduct electrical current without resistance. This property has a wide range of applications. In particular, type-II high-temperature superconductors appear promising for building strong electromagnets carrying large amounts of current in the extreme conditions foreseen for future fusion reactors. However, their fabrication and related experiments are highly expensive and complex. Therefore, there is an increasing need for numerical models to guide the design optimization of superconducting cables and to predict their performance. In this work, we present a new code to simulate high-temperature superconductors (HTS) based on the edge finite element discretization of Maxwell’s equations in the time domain using the widely adopted H-formulation in the superconductor analysis community. This code is integrated in the High-Performance Computing (HPC) Alya suite and obtain an excellent performance up to 1024 processors in MareNostrum 4 supercomputer. This capacity allows to us to solve a wide variate of problems in big domains in relatively reduce amount of computer time, being a promising tool to aboard HTS coils design problems. Furthermore, validations against experimental data are presented and code results for superconducting tapes with different magnetic properties are analyzed.
This work is part of the FusionCAT project (001-P-001722) which has been 50% co-financed by the European Fund for Regional Development of the European Union within the framework of the 2014–2020 ERDF Operational Program of Catalonia, with the support of the Generalitat of Catalonia. In addition, it has been partly co-financed by grant PID2019-110854RB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 .
Peer Reviewed
Postprint (author's final draft)