A superconducting magnet is an electromagnet made from coils of superconducting wire. They must be cooled to cryogenic temperatures during operation. In its superconducting state the wire has no electrical resistance and therefore can conduct much larger electric currents than ordinary wire, creating intense magnetic fields. Superconducting magnets can produce stronger magnetic fields than all but the strongest non-superconducting electromagnets, and large superconducting magnets can be cheaper to operate because no energy is dissipated as heat in the windings. They are used in MRI instruments in hospitals, and in scientific equipment such as NMR spectrometers, mass spectrometers, fusion reactors and particle accelerators. They are also used for levitation, guidance and propulsion in a magnetic levitation (maglev) railway system being constructed in Japan.
During operation, the magnet windings must be cooled below their critical temperature, the temperature at which the winding material changes from the normal resistive state and becomes a superconductor, which is in the cryogenic range far below room temperature. The windings are typically cooled to temperatures significantly below their critical temperature, because the lower the temperature, the better superconductive windings work—the higher the currents and magnetic fields they can stand without returning to their non-superconductive state. Two types of cooling systems are commonly used to maintain magnet windings at temperatures sufficient to maintain superconductivity:
Liquid helium is used as a coolant for many superconductive windings. It has a boiling point of 4.2 K, far below the critical temperature of most winding materials. The magnet and coolant are contained in a thermally insulated container (dewar) called a cryostat. To keep the helium from boiling away, the cryostat is usually constructed with an outer jacket containing (significantly cheaper) liquid nitrogen at 77 K.
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A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to very high speeds and energies, and to contain them in well-defined beams. Large accelerators are used for fundamental research in particle physics. The largest accelerator currently active is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, operated by the CERN. It is a collider accelerator, which can accelerate two beams of protons to an energy of 6.5 TeV and cause them to collide head-on, creating center-of-mass energies of 13 TeV.
Technological applications of superconductivity include: the production of sensitive magnetometers based on SQUIDs (superconducting quantum interference devices) fast digital circuits (including those based on Josephson junctions and rapid single flux quantum technology), powerful superconducting electromagnets used in maglev trains, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) machines, magnetic confinement fusion reactors (e.g.
The tesla (symbol: T) is the unit of magnetic flux density (also called magnetic B-field strength) in the International System of Units (SI). One tesla is equal to one weber per square metre. The unit was announced during the General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1960 and is named in honour of Serbian-American electrical and mechanical engineer Nikola Tesla, upon the proposal of the Slovenian electrical engineer France Avčin.
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The magnet feeders are part of the critical systems of a fusion reactor since they represent the interface between the in-cryostat components at 4.5 K and the room-temperature cryogenic plant and power supply. The European DEMO tokamak foresees 16 toroidal ...
Lausanne2024
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Superconducting electronics provide us with cryogenic digital circuits that can rival established technologies in performance and energy consumption. Today, the lack of tools for the design of large-scale integrated superconducting circuits is a major obst ...
The superconducting magnet system of the Divertor Tokamak Test (DTT) facility, composed of 18 toroidal field (TF) coils, 6 poloidal field coils and a central solenoid, has been designed and many procurements have been launched. Some manufacturing aspects a ...