Irreversible normal zones leading to quench is an important aspect of high-temperature superconductors (HTS) in all practical applications. As a consequence of quench, transport current gets diverted to the matrix stabilizer material of the high-$T_{c}$ composite and causes Joule heating till the original conditions are restored. The nature of growth of the resistive zone in the superconductor greatly influences the temperature evolution of the quenched zone. In this investigation, a complete mathematical analysis of the temperature profile evolution following a quench in a HTS has been carried out. Such prediction in temperature profile would aid the design of HTS tape-based practical applications in limiting the thermal stress-induced damages in off-normal scenarios.

Critical current ($I_{c}$) characteristics of 2G YBCO superconducting tape under the influence of twisting moment was experimentally investigated at varying current ramp rates in the self-field. Under a uniform twist, the degradation in the current-carrying capacity of YBCO tape up to $30\%$ was observed at 77 K. The degradation is largely attributed to the shear stress and torsional shear strain resulting from the twisting. The superconductor to resistive transition index, $n$, is also found to behave in an identical manner with increase in the twisting. Finite element analysis (FEA) of the tape in the experimental configuration with twisting moment being applied on to it has been carried out in COMSOL. The torsional strain calculated analytically as per the experimental configuration matches closely with that of FEA results, which shows that the critical current degradation is a function of strain.

Glow discharge conditioning (GDC) has long been accepted as one of the basic wall conditioning techniques for achieving ultrahigh vacuum in an unbaked chamber. As a part of this fundamental experimental study, a test chamber has been fabricated from stainless steel 304 L with its inner surface electropolished on which a detailed investigation has been carried out. Both helium and hydrogen gases have been employed as discharge cleaning medium. The discharge cleaning was carried out at 0.1 A/m$^{2}$ current density with workingpressure maintained at $1.0 \times 10^{−2}$ mbar. It was experimentally observed that the pump-down time to attain the base pressure $∼10−8$ mbar was reduced by 62% compared to the unbaked chamber being pumped to this ultimate vacuum. The results were similar irrespective of whether the discharge cleaning medium is either hydrogen or helium. It was also experimentally established that a better ultimate vacuum could be achieved as compared to theoretically calculated ultimate vacuum with the help of discharge cleaning.