Bending characteristics of stacked REBCO cable under different stacking modes

Abstract High-temperature superconducting tapes provide new materials for various high-current applications. The stacked tape cable (STC) is one of the promissing structure, which is based on the idea to stack single REBCO tapes. However, stacking the tapes increases the thickness of the cable and reduces its bending performance. In order to study the bending behavior of stacked tapes, bending tests of single tape was first made to analyze the strain of the REBCO layer at different bending radii, and the strain-current curves were obtained by empirical equations. The cables were stacked in both back-to-back and face-to-face modes. The strains of the REBCO layers in the tapes are calculated, and the critical currents of the cables are experimentally measured at various bending radii. The bending characteristics of the cable are analyzed using the fitted equation, and the experimental results demonstrate good agreement with the calculated results. The results indicate that the REBCO layer exhibits improved bending performance under compression, and thinner cables perform better. Therefore, we added copper tape to adjust the position of the neutral axis to optimize the bending performance. The results show that this method can effectively reduce the bending radius of the stacked cable.