SBIR/STTR Award attributes
1 SITUATION BEING ADDRESSED Our nation’s energy delivery system must be secure, resilient, and reliable. The transition to a modern grid will create new technical challenges for an electric power system that was not designed for today’s requirements. This new world grid must enable remote renewable generation, a growing number of distributed energy resources, diversification, and smart, distributed, and secure grids. The electric power grid is facing increasing stress due to fundamental changes in both supply-side and demand-side technologies. Our grid modernization is adding new forms of distributed generation, storage, and load capacity, higher density, bi-directional power flow, and far more interconnects to support growing demand. This increases the amount of power that can be supplied in any one branch. Therefore, all branch circuits must have their fault handing devices upgraded to handle the new higher fault current limit. This necessity leads to a fault current limiter (FCL). Mobile platforms also require a powerful and compact FCL. 2 PROJECT APPROACH Our Benefit: Highest performing conventional and superconducting (SC) cable, magnet, and cable magnet products. This is done via: 1) Lower wind stress ? lower operational stress & complex geometries ? Improved operational parameters; 2) Complex geometries ? lower operational stress ? Improved operational parameters; 3) Automated & optimized winding ? Improved operational parameters & lower cost. Our value proposition is allowing magnet & cable magnet devices never before possible such as: 1) SC devices that were previously winding limited; 2) winding fully HTS & reacted MTS products; 3) 2x to 500x performance improvement; 4) magnets with improved ramp rates (dB/dt & dI/dt). Our revolutionary robotic manufacturing reduces stress via Artificial Intelligence (AI) for a Human Robot Interaction (HRI) which allows higher currents, lower cost, and complex and reliable magnet shapes to produce the first fully cold [both primary and secondary at liquid nitrogen (LN2) temperatures] high temperature superconducting (HTS), first combined inductive and resistive FCL, and first tiered FCL with the possibility of lessened to removed splice hot spots. ASCFCL is a passive alternating current (AC) (majority of the world grid), compact and simple design, low weight [air core & less copper (Cu)], more reliable and less FCL and grid stressing since multi-tiered, high power FCL. 3 PHASE I WORK EFFORT Phase I will develop automation benefits for winding a sub-scale HTS FCL for feasibility testing from normal operation to a fault condition. Phase II will develop and prove the commercial viability of a full-scale LN2 cooled, compact, multi-layer, combined inductive and resistive, air core, alternating current (AC) HTS FCL for minimum 10MVA at 10kV and will form the basis of higher power versions of ASCFCL. The device will be electrically passive, low impedance during normal operation, fast acting to respond within part of a cycle during a fault, and will recover under load. Over time and due to automation and quantity production, magnet fabrication and HTS material costs will naturally fall allowing an increased customer base. 4 COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS AND OTHER BENEFITS Our civilization consumes greater amounts of power and in increasing electrical proportions. Existing global electrical infrastructure installed over a half century ago is past end of life and facing capacity problems. Nations without a grid infrastructure demand a grid. Utilities are moving beyond classical solutions with unprecedented speed to modernize the grid. This project addresses the needs of supporting the estimated world electricity consumption expected to double from 20 trillion kWh/year today to more than 40 trillion kWh/year by 2040. This project will result in commercial utility market technology advances and beyond.
