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Conductor requirements for high-temperature superconducting utility power transformers

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2010 Supercond. Sci. Technol. 23 014025

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IOP PUBLISHING SUPERCONDUCTOR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Supercond. Sci. Technol. 23 (2010) 014025 (5pp) doi:10.1088/0953-2048/23/1/014025

Conductor requirements for

high-temperature superconducting utility
power transformers
E F Pleva1 , V Mehrotra1 and S W Schwenterly2
1
Waukesha Electric Systems, Waukesha, WI 53186, USA
2
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, USA

E-mail: Ed.Pleva@Waukesha.spx.com

Received 11 September 2009, in final form 19 October 2009

Published 9 December 2009
Online at stacks.iop.org/SUST/23/014025

Abstract
High-temperature superconducting (HTS) coated conductors in utility power transformers must
satisfy a set of operating requirements that are driven by two major considerations—HTS
transformers must be economically competitive with conventional units, and the conductor must
be robust enough to be used in a commercial manufacturing environment. The transformer
design and manufacturing process will be described in order to highlight the various
requirements that it imposes on the HTS conductor. Spreadsheet estimates of HTS transformer
costs allow estimates of the conductor cost required for an HTS transformer to be competitive
with a similarly performing conventional unit.
(Some figures in this article are in colour only in the electronic version)

1. Introduction Electric Systems (WES), SuperPower Inc., Oak Ridge National

Power transformers are an essential component of the electric
utility grid, providing both voltage step-up from generator
outputs in the range of 25 kV to transmission levels above
100 kV and step-down back to distribution levels near the
load points. In a power grid system, each MVA of generation
capacity requires an average of 5–7 MVA of transformer
capacity between each generator and the loads it serves. Due
to the large number of transformers in the system, even a
fractional per cent efficiency gain on each one can add up to
large energy savings. HTS transformers offer the advantages
of reduced losses due to the lack of Joule heating, as well
as reduced unit weight and volume. Because they use liquid
nitrogen in place of insulating oil, they present minimal fire
hazard and environmental impact. Furthermore, they can be
run at overload with increased refrigeration requirements, but
no loss of life such as that caused by overheating of the oil
and insulation in a conventional unit. Finally, it is possible to
design an HTS transformer with built-in fault current limiting
capability.
Prototype HTS transformers have been built by teams
in several countries, including Europe [1–4], Japan [5, 6],
China [7], and Korea [8]. In 2004, a Superconductivity
Partnership Initiative (SPI) collaboration between Waukesha
Laboratory (ORNL) and the utility Energy East culminated in
the testing of a 5 MVA HTS transformer that was intended for
operation in the substation at WES’s factory [9]. This unit met
most of its current carrying and cryogenic goals. However, the
cast-epoxy-insulated coils cracked during cooldown, leading
to an electrical breakdown when the unit was energized at
high voltage. This transformer used first-generation Bi-
2223 conductor and operated near 25 K. The development
in recent years of commercial second-generation YBCO
coated conductor tapes (YBCO-CCs) offers the prospect of
operation in liquid nitrogen. This would allow much simpler
refrigeration schemes and improved high-voltage dielectric
performance. A follow-on collaboration between WES and
ORNL has continued in order to determine whether these
advantages can be realized in a practical, production-ready
HTS transformer design with a rating of 25 MVA or above.
In this paper it is assumed that YBCO-CC HTS tape would be
used in the transformer.
2. Transformer layout
Figure 1 shows a generic HTS transformer layout. The high-
and low-voltage windings for each phase are concentric and are

0953-2048/10/014025+05$30.00 1 © 2010 IOP Publishing Ltd Printed in the UK

Supercond. Sci. Technol. 23 (2010) 014025
Figure 1. Schematic of HTS transformer cross section.
enclosed in a vacuum-insulated dewar vessel. The windings
are bathed in pressurized nitrogen held at a temperature near
70 K by a cooling shell located at the outer perimeter of
the dewar. The three winding sets are installed on a three-
phase core of laminated steel. This core is very similar to
the one in a conventional unit. The core is in ambient air,
and must be insulated from the inner diameter of the windings
by the dewar vessel. Since the dewar vessel cannot form a
shorted turn around a core limb, it must be made of electrically
insulating composite materials. The high-voltage bushings and
cryocoolers coupled to the cooling shells are installed in the
upper part of the dewar vessel. A weather enclosure surrounds
the unit in place of the usual oil tank in a conventional unit.
Cooling for the core is provided by a blower that forces air
flow through baffles around the upper and lower yokes, and up
through the three annular gaps between the dewars and core
limbs.
3. The transformer manufacturing process
To speed the adoption of HTS materials in transformers, it is
highly desirable to use winding concepts that closely parallel
those for conventional units. This will allow conventional
manufacturing techniques and materials to be used without
major modifications and minimize retraining of production
personnel. High-voltage tests at WES and ORNL have
shown that conventional pressboard and kraft paper materials
impregnated with liquid nitrogen give breakdown strengths
comparable to values with oil.
3.1. Winding configuration
High-voltage transformer windings are generally wound in
discs or pancakes as opposed to layer windings. The disc
configuration helps the windings withstand lightning and
switching voltage surges by distributing the surge voltage
more evenly along the winding. The discs are wound from
2
E F Pleva et al
Figure 2. Conventional transformer disc winding showing crossover
transitions.
a continuous length of conductor to minimize splices. In a
conventional transformer, transitions between discs are made
by making a sharp S-bend on the conductor in the ‘hard’
direction as shown in figure 2. This sort of abuse would destroy
the superconducting layer if the in-plane bending radius is less
than about 1 m [10]. It can be shown that transitions with such a
large bending radius would be unreasonably long and interfere
with the spacers between discs. In an HTS winding, it will
instead be necessary to make these transitions in such a way
that the conductor can bend and twist slightly with minimum
in-plane deformation. Extra support pieces may be needed for
the transitions to prevent the conductor from deforming under
the winding tension.
Conventional transformer discs have between 20 and
30 turns. This keeps the windings and thus the steel core
limbs from becoming too tall. Core limbs longer than 2 m
are flexible and difficult to handle in the factory. Enough
window area is needed to accommodate the required winding
turns, insulation clearances, and dewar vacuum spaces. Core
windows with a height–width ratio in the neighborhood of
1.5 reduce the required amount of core steel (and thus core
losses) in comparison with tall, narrow windows. On the
other hand, going to 20 or more turns per disc in an HTS
transformer greatly increases the magnetic fields on the inner
turns, reducing the critical current and increasing the ac loss.
Furthermore, shorter windings with more turns per disc have a
greater portion of the volume in the end regions that experience
high perpendicular magnetic fields. These perpendicular fields
can reduce the critical current due to the anisotropic field
dependence, as well as increase ac loss. Discs with about
10 turns would thus be preferable in an HTS transformer.
However, discs with 10 turns lead to larger-diameter core
limbs to increase the volts per turn and reduce core height.
This increases core weight and core losses, which are heavily
penalized by utility customers in their economic evaluation of a
transformer design. To reduce these disadvantages, conductor
manufacturers will need to reduce ac losses in the conductor
by striating or filamentizing the HTS [11–14]. Introduction of
artificial pinning centers such as nano-particles can also reduce
ac losses by improving the critical current and reducing the
anisotropy of the magnetic field effect [15–22].
Supercond. Sci. Technol. 23 (2010) 014025
3.2. Conductor design
YBCO-CCs as they currently come from the manufacturer are
typically 3.0–12.0 mm wide, and are only about 100–200 µm
thick. The critical current of the tape must exceed the peak
value of the current in overload operation. Since the critical
current is affected by the magnitude and orientation of the
magnetic field, the location of the area in the windings with
minimum critical current needs to be carefully identified. The
designer must also consider the statistical variation of the self-
field critical current over each delivered length of tape.
In a typical substation installation, there are two
transformers that split the load. Generally, transformers are
designed to be able to operate for short periods of about
30 min at an overload current of twice the rated value, so
that if one transformer fails, the other can assume the full
load. A single tape in the high-voltage winding of a 25 MVA,
115 kV transformer would need a minimum critical current
above 205 A. It will be necessary for manufacturers to offer
a wide range of tape widths so that the transformer designer
can properly match the critical current with the required value
for a given transformer voltage and current rating and optimize
the design. For conventional transformers, copper conductor
dimensions come in 0.1 mm increments. The low-voltage
winding will generally carry a current an order of magnitude
above the high-voltage current. Multiple conductors will be
required, and these will most likely need a different width from
the high-voltage conductor. The finished conductor should
incorporate extra metal stabilizer as discussed below. The
conductor with its attached stabilizer must have rounded edges
and be smooth and free of burrs that could trigger a high-
voltage breakdown. The surfaces of currently available YBCO-
CCs are quite smooth due to processing requirements, but the
slitting process that sets the finished width produces sharp
edges. These must be smoothed or shielded by the attached
stabilizer.
The YBCO-CC needs to have extra normal metal stabilizer
added for several reasons. If the transformer terminals are
short-circuited, fault currents an order of magnitude above the
operating current can flow briefly until circuit breakers in the
network open. Enough stabilizer must be provided to carry
the fault current without going too far above liquid nitrogen
temperature after the YBCO layer quenches. A stabilizer
thickness of 1 mm or more is desirable. In a fault, the current
will rise to some multiple of the critical current in the first
quarter cycle until the YBCO layer quenches. Current will then
quickly transfer to the stabilizer. The stabilizer current then
falls to a value determined by the ratio of the winding voltage to
its impedance, which is a combination of the winding reactance
and the stabilizer resistance in quadrature. If the fault is
terminated when a breaker trips, the temperature rise can be
estimated with a straightforward adiabatic calculation from
the stabilizer cross-section area, resistivity, and heat capacity,
for a given fault duration. If a copper stabilizer is used, the
stabilizer resistance will typically be small compared to the
winding reactance, and the reactance will determine the fault
current. For a 0.5 s fault, about 2 mm of copper can limit the
temperature rise to about 10 K, but will not provide current
limiting. With a resistive stabilizer such as stainless steel
3
E F Pleva et al
of thickness 1 mm, the resistance can easily be an order of
magnitude above the winding reactance. Such a winding can
provide significant current limiting, though the current must be
interrupted by a breaker within ∼0.1 s to prevent overheating
of the conductor. In this case, the calculated temperature
rise is on the order of 100 K and the maximum temperature
would be about 170 K. The maximum allowable temperature
is determined from estimates of differential thermal expansion
stresses and the required re-cooling time for the unit. The
greatest stabilizer thickness now offered by US commercial
suppliers is about 0.35 mm.
The fault currents also create large forces on the windings,
and so the conductor must be robust to withstand them. This
is particularly true for the inner winding, which is subjected
to large radial inward forces and axial compressive forces
that can bend the conductor between spacers. The outer
winding experiences radial outward forces, but it will still
have high compressive axial forces on the discs near the ends.
The windings must be tight to prevent turn motion in faults
and vibration with ac currents. Typical transformer winding
tensions are in the range of 90 N (20 lb). The transformer
windings must also be very tightly compressed along the
winding axis. This causes the winding turns to partially indent
the spacers between discs and helps prevent them from slipping
under fault forces. A conductor width-to-thickness ratio near
six or seven is preferred so that the stack of conductors in a
disc will be stable under radial and winding tension forces,
but will not twist and tilt under axial forces from faults. In
a conventional transformer, the windings are compressed with
hydraulic jacks before the top core yoke is installed, and held
in compression by the core itself. A typical compression
pressure is 15 MPa (2200 psi) spread across the top of the
winding, causing the winding to shorten by about 1.5%. In
an HTS transformer, the windings are supported inside the
dewar vacuum jacket and are not strongly coupled to the core.
Compression would instead be provided by end plates retained
by long non-conductive threaded rods and springs or Belville
washers.
If the stabilizer is equally distributed on either side of
the tape so that the YBCO-CC is at the neutral axis, it will
experience minimal bending forces. Such a conductor can
be bent to a radius near 1 cm without degradation of the
critical current [23]. However, in a 25 MVA-class winding
with diameter in the range of 0.75 m, it may be possible
to keep bending strains below 0.1%, so that the YBCO-CC
can be on the outside, bonded to both sides of the stabilizer.
This may be beneficial in reducing ac losses in the conductor
if the superconductor is able to partially shield the stabilizer
from the magnetic field. However, further testing is needed
in real winding geometries to determine which configuration
is preferred. It would of course be preferable to deposit the
whole HTS stack including buffer and cap layers directly on the
stabilizer, and we hope that this would be a future development
by the conductor suppliers.
It could be argued that the addition of extra metal stabilizer
reduces the engineering current density in the winding
and might negate the advantages of using superconducting
materials. However, this is not an issue in a transformer
Supercond. Sci. Technol. 23 (2010) 014025
because heavy conductor insulation and few-mm clearances
between winding discs must be provided in any case to prevent
high-voltage breakdown. High-field magnets generally require
high winding current densities, but in a transformer the high
permeability of the core steel instead of the conductor provides
the high field of about 1.7 T. Typical copper current densities
in a conventional transformer winding are in the range of
3–4 A mm−2 . In contrast, a YBCO conductor carrying 200 A
with overall dimensions of say, 10 mm × 1.1 mm including
stabilizer has an effective current density of 18 A mm−2 . This
reduces the winding volume, resulting in an HTS transformer
with about half the volume and 60% of the weight of a
conventional unit.
3.3. Piece lengths
Utility power transformers typically operate in the range of
70–100 V/turn. Thus the high-voltage winding of a 25 MVA,
115 kV transformer might have about 1400 turns. The
average turn diameter is determined by the core diameter plus
clearances for assembly, dewar vacuum jackets, and electrical
insulation. For a 25 MVA transformer, this would be about
0.75 m as mentioned above. A total of about 6 km of YBCO-
CC would be required for each of the three phases, with
respectively about 3.2 and 2.8 km in the high- and low-voltage
windings. The windings would be constructed from 8 to
10 similar modules that could be separately tested in liquid
nitrogen, in order to reduce the amount of expensive YBCO-
CC at risk if a module should fail. If the high-voltage winding
has a single conductor, each module would require a 300–
400 m long piece of tape. The low-voltage modules would
have 10 or more conductors in parallel, with each piece length
on the order of 20 m. Low-resistance splices can be made
to join shorter lengths of tape and to connect the modules
together [24].
3.4. Conductor insulation
The conductor is wrapped with roughly 0.5 mm of high-
voltage insulation on automatic high-speed machines before it
is wound into the transformer coils. Figure 3 shows a close-up
of this process. The insulating tapes are under tension, and the
extra stabilizer material also helps the conductor withstand side
forces and torques during the wrapping operation. It should be
noted that the YBCO-CC could not simply be laid next to the
stabilizer and co-wrapped with high-voltage insulation. Our
winding tests have shown that if this is done, the component
on the inside radius tends to buckle and split the insulation,
due to the slightly different bend diameters of the conductor
layers.
3.5. AC loss
The ac loss at a given point in the winding is a combination
of self-field strip losses, fully penetrated hysteresis losses from
the external fields produced by the rest of the winding, possible
ferromagnetic losses from the YBCO-CC substrate, and eddy
current losses generated in the stabilizer. Maximum peak
magnetic fields in a transformer winding are in the range of
4
E F Pleva et al
Figure 3. Winding machine applying insulating tapes.
a few tenths of a tesla. A calculation of the total ac loss
distribution in the winding is very complex and requires details
of the winding configuration. However, a required average loss
figure can be calculated easily. Assume for a 25 MVA unit
that a maximum of 1200 W of refrigeration is available, which
is a practical value for existing commercial cryocoolers. The
losses from the current leads, conduction in the structure, and
radiation would total about 400 W, leaving 800 W available for
the ac losses. If the unit contains a total of 18 km of conductor,
the required average ac loss would then be 44 mW m−1 . Loss
measurements should be made on scaled-down test coils with
the same layer build as the full-size winding to estimate the
loss performance.
4. Economic comparisons
A comprehensive spreadsheet tool has been developed for
calculating HTS transformer costs, dimensions, weights, and
losses. This has been used to compare the lifetime cost of
ownership of a 25 MVA, 115 kV/13.09 kV HTS transformer
with that of a similar conventional unit recently delivered by
WES. The conventional unit is air-cooled by radiators equipped
with fans. It has 15, 20, or 25 MVA ratings with respectively no
fans, one stage of fans, or two stages. It can operate for 30 min
at 50 MVA load with increasing temperature. We propose that
an equivalent HTS unit would have cryocoolers sized to the
25 MVA load. It would contain enough HTS conductor so
that with a 50 MVA load, the peak current would be below the
HTS critical current. For loads below 25 MVA, the cryocoolers
would be cycled on and off or slowed down to match the
load and maintain a temperature near 70 K. With 50 MVA
operation, the leads and windings would run with high losses
and boil off liquid nitrogen. Enough stored nitrogen (roughly
100 l) would be provided on-site so that the transformer could
operate at 50 MVA for 30 min. The spreadsheet was run with
current commercial copper and steel costs and HTS conductor
cost assumptions ranging from $10 to $50 kA−1 m−1 . The
utility customer adds a loss penalty to the selling price to
Supercond. Sci. Technol. 23 (2010) 014025
Table 1. Comparison of required conductor properties with current
available values.
Conductor property Required value Current value
−1 −1
Price ($ kA m ) 20 400–500
Available width 6–12 in 0.1 mm 3, 4, 4.4, 6, 12
(mm) increments
Winding magnetic 0.3 2 high-voltage winding and 20 m for the low-voltage winding are
field (T)
AC loss (mW m−1 ) 40–50 (average in Winding-dependent
winding)
Stabilizer thickness 1 0.35
(mm)
Piece length (m) 400 1000
determine a total lifetime cost of ownership. These loss penalty
costs vary greatly among various utility companies, but typical
values are $1250 kW−1 for load losses and $2500 kW−1 for
no-load losses. The calculations show that if the YBCO-
CC costs $20 kA−1 m−1 and cryogenic refrigerator costs are
half the current values, the HTS and conventional lifetime
costs of ownership are comparable. Note that the required
YBCO-CC price is less than 5% of current prices. The current
prices are so far not very sensitive to purchased lot sizes
because price reductions are brought about more by increases
in the manufacturer’s total production volume, not the size
of individual lots. The price is expected to fall an order of
magnitude to about $50 kA−1 m−1 during the next decade.
Even at this price level, HTS transformers may be competitive
with conventional units in certain applications where their
additional advantages are most important. As mentioned in
section 1, these include higher efficiency, greatly reduced fire
and environmental hazards due to the lack of flammable oil,
reduced weight and size, overload operation with no loss of
life, and fault current limiting capability.
5. Summary
The foregoing investigations show that for HTS transformers to
be cost-competitive with conventional units, a conductor price
reduction to less than 5% of current levels is needed, as well
as a 50% reduction in current cryocooler costs. The minimum
YBCO-CC critical current in the windings must be above the
transformer’s peak current in overload operation. Conductor
should be available in custom widths to properly match the
unit’s rated peak current. The conductor must operate in a
maximum peak ac field of a few tenths of a tesla. Reduction
of ac losses would allow the transformer core to be lighter
E F Pleva et al
and more compact, and would reduce both core no-load losses
and conductor load losses. To handle insulating, winding, and
fault forces as well as heating generated in faults, 1 mm or
more of extra stabilizer must be bonded to the YBCO-CC.
The conductor must be smooth with rounded corners for high-
voltage integrity. Piece lengths on the order of 400 m for the
required. Table 1 compares current commercial offerings by
US suppliers with these requirements [25–27]. Available piece
lengths, widths, and field capabilities meet the requirements
for prototype test units. Measurements of ac loss are highly
dependent on winding design, but preliminary results on test
coils appear to be acceptable. The main requirement for
prototype units that still needs to be satisfied is the provision
of thicker stabilizer material.
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