General Electric, in conjunction with the US Department of Energy, has undertaken the design, manufacture and testing of a 100 MVA class high temperature superconducting (HTS) generator. The HTS rotor will be suitable for use in new generators as well as a retrofit product for existing generators. This paper discusses key areas of design and testing of the generator as first steps in the development of HTS synchronous generators.

Abstract-HTS wires, which may be used in many devices such as magnets and rotating machines, may be subjected to mechanical strains from electromagnetic, thermal and centripetal forces. In some applications these strains will be repeated several thousand times during the lifetime of the device. We have measured critical current degradation due to repeated strain cycles for both compressive and tensile strains. Results for BSCCO-2223 HTS conductor samples are presented for strain values up to 0.5% and cycle numbers up to and beyond 10 4 .

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When a synchronous generator connected to the power grid experiences a fault, it is required to stay on line, ride through the fault, and be able to carry full rated field current when the fault is cleared. The peak current during these events could be 2 times higher than the normal operating current. This may cause an HTS rotor coil to go into normal state and generate Joule heating. If the fault event is short enough and the heat dumped can be carried away by the cooling system, the coil may recover to the superconducting state at the end of the fault. Otherwise, the coil may thermally run away, or 'quench'. To investigate the quench behavior of the HTS rotor coil of the 100 MVA generator at GE Global Research Center, a 1.5 MVA prototype coil was developed and tested to quench under different conditions. The experiment design, set up, tests and test results are presented in this paper.Index Terms-High temperature superconductor, over current, quench, superconducting generators.

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