Airplane motors employing superconducting DC field windings and conventional conductor AC windings

Abstract

Many organizations are developing compact lightweight highly efficient rotating machines for airplane applications. These machines include permanent magnets for excitation and an iron-core with and without superconducting windings. Air-core (no magnetic iron) machines have the potential to be the most lightweight and efficient. Such machines can use superconductors for both DC excitation field coils and AC armature coils, which need conductors under development, like MgB₂ and Bi2212. If liquid-hydrogen (LH₂) is available on a plane and can be used as a coolant, it becomes feasible to develop machines with AC armature coils made from conventional conductors like copper, aluminium, and high-conductivity aluminium.This paper describes conceptual designs for a 3 MW, 4,500 RPM motor employing REBCO CORC conductor for the DC field coils and conventional conductor Litz cable for the AC armature coils cooled by LH₂ available on the plane. Both rotor and stator coils are contained in separate cryostats. The DC excitation coils on the rotor are operated at 40 K to work successfully with a brushless flux pump exciter. Likewise, stator AC coils are cooled with available LH₂ to take advantage of the lower resistivity of conventional conductors at cryogenic temperatures. Motor size, mass and losses are compared for stator windings employing copper, aluminium, and high-conductivity aluminium (Hyper-Al). Compared with copper and aluminium machines, the machine employing Hyper-Al has smaller size, mass and total losses.