There is a recent surge in activity to develop high power electric (or hybrid electric) aircraft. Part of this development effort is the creation of lightweight and small volume high-performance superconducting motors and airborne superconducting power transmission cables. As part of the power transmission of a distributed propulsion aircraft will be T-terminals to extract power to individual motors from a “main” power cable. In this research, high purity Copper-Aluminum composite T-terminals, with input cylindrical HTS cables with transport currents in the main cable of 20 kA, were investigated using multiphysics simulations. Discussed are a proposed T-junction geometry, simulation parameters, and influences on contact resistances and on power losses and T-junction volume.

Keywords: HTS cables, aerospace, electric aircraft, power distribution