THEA

Overview

THEA performs stationary and non-stationary Thermal, Hydraulic and Electric Analysis of a generic superconducting cable, cooled by forced-flow. THEA is suited for the full spectrum of evolutions, from cooldown of a coil to the stability analysis of the conductor. At the time of its release, THEA is the only code that takes consistently into account all macroscopic phenomena with the following origins:
  • thermal: heat generation and diffusion along the cable;
  • hydraulic: mass, momentum and energy transport along the coolant flow;
  • electric: current diffusion and distribution along the cable;

Details

  • A 1 and 1/2-D description of the cable. An arbitrary number of thermal, hydraulic and electric components are mutually coupled as specified by the user.

  • Modular conductor. The user selects the components and materials forming the cable, including superconductor and stabilizer, the additional structural materials or insulating barriers. Each component can have a fine, homogeneised structure that is defined by the user. The number and size of the cooling channels is as well arbitrary.

  • Flexible electrical model. Electric components can be defined and coupled through inductive and resistive current transfer. The electrical and thermal models are coupled to model resistive transition effects on current transfer and Joule heating.

  • Power-law dependence of the longitudinal electric field in the superconductor and consistent current sharing model, for the accurate description of operating conditions around the current sharing regime (e.g. critical current measurements and stability transients).

  • Geometry variations along the cable length can be easily taken into account. Both thermal components and cooling channels can have variable cross sections, thermophysical and hydraulic properties along the cable length (e.g. to model joints).

  • The solver uses finite elements in space (up to fifth order interpolation) and a multi-step finite difference integrator in time (up to third order accurate). Automatic time step adaptivity is used to control the integration errors and to cope with strong variations in the solution.

  • Extensive user's defined routines to allow easy-to-use interfacing to user's specific applications.

  • Graphic (Postscript) post-processor included in the package.

  • Open structure, for evolutive simulation power. The code is largely parametric, and thus can cope with new geometries, new materials and new phenomena. THEA is the cable simulator of the future. Work is in progress on:
    • New solvers with improved efficiency and larger modelling capability
    • Mesh adaptivity, including the front-tracking algorithm of Gandalf
    • Add-on's to yet expand the simulation capability (see Gandalf's add-on's)

Examples  

Some examples of code runs and results:

Version  

June 2003, version 1.3

Installations

  • Workstation (AIX on RISC-6000, Solaris on Sun-Spark, DEC Alpha, HP UX)

  • Linux (MkLinux on PowerMacintosh)

Resources

  • in excess of 256 MB RAM

  • Fortran compiler

  • CPU of the order of 30 mins to several hrs per run.

On-line documentation  

Download the manual in Pdf format for the latest version of THEA

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