ENEA-Fusion: Superconductivity

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SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

Responsible: Antonio della Corte
e-mail: dellacorte@frascati.enea.it
tel.: +39 06 9400 5720
fax.: +39 06 9400 5393

The Superconductivity Section of "Fusion,Tecnology and Nuclear Protection" department of ENEA at Frascati has been doing R&D in the field of applied superconductivity for more than 30 years.

The main features concern:

study and improvement of superconductor materials at "high" (YBCO and BiSCCO) and "low" (NbTi and Nb₃Sn) "critical transition temperature";
development and characterisation of superconducting devices, strands and cables;
design of high-field magnets and conductors for large-scale applications;
and experimental activities to study on stability and on operating limits of conductor and coil prototypes.

Many collaborations between our laboratories and Italian industries have significantly increased the competence in producing superconducting strands and cables as well as the capability to fabricate superconducting magnets.

Since 1985, the Superconductivity Section partecipates to the European R&D technology programme for ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), an international project with Europe, Japan, USA, Russian Federation, China, South Korea and India as partners. The programme is partly funded by Euratom. ENEA has contributed about 25% of the European R&D activities on superconducting magnets for ITER.
Moreover, our group has been given the responsability for coordinating the work done in Europe to develop the Nb₃Sn and NbTi composite superconductors needed for the magnetic coils of ITER.

Thanks to our, internationally recognized, high level of competence acquired in designing and developing superconducting conductors and magnets for ITER, ENEA has been entrusted of managing the design, production and test of the 18 toroidal coils for the new japanese tokamak JT-60SA, a fusion experimental reactor in preparation and complementary of ITER.

The activity on "high critical temperature" superconductivity is mainly addressed to R&D of methods for realization of YBa₂Cu₃O_7-xbased superconducting tapes (YBCO) by means of the deposition techniques used for thin films.
This material is being studied worldwide because potentially it can be produced on a large scale at competitive costs and also it has good electric transport properties in the presence of magnetic fields at temperatures (65-80°K) obtainable with liquid nitrogen. This allows to prefigure power applications with reduced cryogenic costs compared to superconducting materials at high critical temperature which are currently available on the market.

Superconductivity in detail

Lines of activity and development

Labs and plants

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