Test of a cryogenic set-up for a 10 meter long liquid nitrogen cooled superconducting power cable

High temperature superconducting power cables may be cooled by a forced flow of sub-cooled liquid nitrogen. One way to do this is to circulate the liquid nitrogen (LN2) by means of a mechanical pump through the core of the cable and through a sub-cooler.Besides the cooling station, the cryogenics of a superconducting cable includes the thermal insulation of the cable, the current- and coolant feed-throughs and possibly dynamic vacuum control. Since feed-throughs represent major sources of heat in-leak to the cryogenic system it is important to optimise the design and the number of these in a superconducting cable. We report on our experimental set-up for testing a 10 meter long high temperature superconducting cable with a critical current of 3.2 kA at 77K. The set-up consists of a custom designed cable end termination, current lead, coolant feed-through, liquid nitrogen closed loop circulation system and a commercial vacuum insulated hose for thermal insulation. The system is designed to yield both electrical and thermal data.