Trade-off modeling of superconducting levitation machines: theory and experiment

Abstract

Based on the critical state model for the superconducting components, we develop a set of theoretical tools that allow to extract relevant engineering parameters of a superconducting levitation machine. We provide a number of analytical and numerical expressions for the evaluation of the electromagnetic quantities, energies and forces in 2D problems. This assumption includes: (i) rotational symmetric systems as those in bearings and motors, and also the case of (ii) translational symmetry as in long transportation lines. The theory, that trades off simplicity and predictive power builds on the vector potential/current density formulation of the Maxwell equations (A, J) and is validated by comparison against experimental tension-compression data in our universal test machine. As shown, very simple computer coding is required to implement the method.