Experimental and modelling studies of transverse load on DI-BSCCO tapes

The Flutter coil for Varian’s next generation proton therapy treatment facility, uses DI-BSCCO high temperature superconducting tapes. The coil under full load experiences a large transverse force. In this thesis, the transverse load limits of the tape are experimentally tested, showing irreversibly degradation around −250 MPa when pressing with a 1 mm pushing head. This is compared with a 3D simulation of the experiment, where a BSCCO filament failure criterion of σ3 = −775 MPa shows the same degradation as the experiment. A single tape inside the coil is then modeled and this shows that the transverse load limit of the Flutter coil under full load amounts to −600 MPa, which means a safety margin of approximately 300%.