Contact problems in the design of a superconducting quadrupole prototype

This paper focuses on the design of a superconducting quadrupole prototype This structure includes many frictional contact zones, and the loading cond itions are complex (mechanical, thermal and magnetic). A dedicated computat ional strategy, based on bath a decomposition of the structure and an itera tive resolution scheme, has been applied to solve this problem. A simplifie d approach is used to take complex loading conditions into account. The ini tial set of results, which are presented herein, demonstrates the interest of this approach with respect to classical finite element methods. This stu dy was conducted within the framework of a joint research contract between the CEA (DSM/DPANIA/STCM) and LMT-Cachan.