A Study on the Insulation Properties of Cryogen for the HTS SMES

Recently, for improvement of the magnetic field of high temperature superconductor (HTS) apparatus, many studies investigating on operating in the range of with liquid helium or the conducting method using cryocooler is actively reviewed. Also, the cooling method using solid nitrogen as cryogen is being suggested. Since the nitrogen has very large specific heat in solid state, it is expected that it can enable long time operation without a continuous supply of cooling energy. However, there is still insufficient data on the characteristics of solid nitrogen such as thermodynamic properties and liquid-solid phase change. Especially, there was almost no study done on the electrical insulation properties of solid nitrogen so far. In this study, solid nitrogen to find the electrical characteristics was made by using cryocooler and cryostat, and investigated the flashover discharge and breakdown. The results of this study will be useful as a basic data for electrical insulation design of the HTS system using solid nitrogen as cryogen.