Overcritical Current Resistivity of YBCO-Coated Conductors Through Combination of PCM and Finite-Element Analysis

Understanding the electro-thermal behavior of high-temperature superconductor (HTS) materials is a critical aspect for designing efficient and reliable applications. In order to optimize cost and performance, one needs to understand the role played by the various layers of an HTS tape during a quench. On one hand, the electrical and thermal properties of the materials used in the manufacturing of those tapes (e.g., alloy substrate, silver, and copper) are well known. Knowledge of the functional dependence of the superconductor's resistivity rho(J, T) above the critical current in 2G HTS CCs is very limited. In the flux creep or normal state regime, the resistivity can be approximated by empirical laws. In the flux-flow regime, it is difficult to extract rho(J, T) due to the presence of Joule heating. In this contribution, using finite-element analysis, we present a method to retrieve the overcritical current resistivity, by estimating the amount of current, temperature, and heat present in the various layers.