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Waveform Control Pulsed Field Magnetization of RE-Ba-Cu-O Bulk Superconducting Rings

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

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Authors

Tsui, YK 
Dennis, AR 
Shi, Y 

Abstract

One of the potential applications of ring-shaped, single grain RE-Ba-Cu-O bulk superconductors is in desktop magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) systems as an alternative to conventional permanent magnets. The higher magnetic field available from magnetized bulk superconductors could significantly improve the performance of such systems, as well as reduce their size and increase portability. The pulsed field magnetization (PFM) method provides a fast, compact and cost-effective method for magnetizing these materials as trapped field magnets. However, bulk superconducting rings are very suscep-tible to thermomagnetic instabilities during the PFM process, and thus, to date, the reported trapped fields in ring bulks magnet-ized by PFM are less than 0.35 T at the centre of single rings. In this work, we demonstrate that the trapped field in a super-conducting ring bulk can be enhanced significantly by optimizing the waveform of the magnetizing pulse used in the PFM method. This optimization can be achieved easily by using an Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor as a fast-switching device with a control-lable switching frequency in the pulse-generating electric circuit. Our findings represent a key step forward in utilizing bulk, sin-gle-grain superconducting rings magnetized by PFM in portable magnet systems.

Description

Keywords

Superconducting magnets, Magnetic resonance imaging, Magnetic field measurement, Magnetic flux, Insulated gate bipolar transistors, High-temperature superconductors, Voltage measurement, High-temperature superconductivity, bulk superconductors, bulk superconducting rings, trapped field magnets, pulsed field magnetization, waveform control

Journal Title

IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1051-8223
1558-2515

Volume Title

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/P020313/1)
EPSRC (EP/T014679/1)
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