Abstract
The transition to electric propulsion aircraft requires electrical motors or generators with high power density. The “zero resistivity” of the superconducting materials could be used in electrical machines to produce high magnetic fields and reduce the use of heavy components such as the ferromagnetic parts. The discovery and recent developments in High Temperature Superconductors (HTS) technology make the superconducting machine a serious candidate in the future of aircraft. The design of a superconducting machine is strongly dependent on its electromagnetic and thermal behavior. In this paper, the design of a 50 kW superconducting aircraft generator is presented. The mass of the cryogenic cooling system is included into the design in order to optimize the entire superconducting system. The study shows that the choice of the cooling temperature to reduce the mass of the superconducting machine and its cooling system will depends on the input power of the machine.
Highlights
The aerospace industry is primarily concerned by the move towards electric propulsion alternatives with the desire to improve fuel economy, reduced emissions or noises
Almost all aircraft energy (∼90%) is dedicated to the propulsion, the major gain of efficiency should come from the propulsion system
We observed that the superconducting technology is more interesting in terms of power-to-mass ratio than the standard technology of machine for a MW-class machine [20]
Summary
The aerospace industry is primarily concerned by the move towards electric propulsion alternatives with the desire to improve fuel economy, reduced emissions or noises. Most of the major achievements have concerned naval propulsions or wind generators These applications require low rotational speeds and the specific powers are not important, unlike the specific torques. Beyond the large possibilities of superconducting machine topology [6,7], the flux modulation machine is selected because of its brushless structure This electrical machine was already built in its radial form using low temperature superconductors [8,9]. For this project, the axial topology is selected which seems to have a higher power-to-mass ratio. We will see that this study requires the knowledge of the electromagnetic and thermal behavior for which different semianalytical, analytical and numerical models will be proposed
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