Quench Propagation and Heating in the Superconducting 600 A Auxiliary Busbars of the LHC

In the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN 22 km of flexible superconducting cable, the auxiliary busbar cable, will conduct currents of up to 600 A to a large number of corrector magnets distributed throughout the accelerator. A prototype cable with 42 active conductors underwent several experiments to measure the hot spot temperature and the quench propagation velocity as a function of the current. The former was evaluated for various energy extraction scenarios as they are foreseen for the LHC corrector circuits. The experimental results and the heat flow simulations show that the quench behavior in this busbar prototype is strongly influenced by the heat flow through the insulation material (polyimide) into the helium bath, leading to stable configurations above the critical temperature Tc for currents between 250 A and 500 A. Special attention was paid to the study of discontinuities in the wires, like feed-throughs, where the wire is not immersed in liquid helium, and joints, where the wire cross-section is increased. The experiments and simulations led to a thorough understanding of the quench process in the wires of the prototype cable, which resulted in guidelines for the design, the use and the installation of the cable in the LHC.