Tradeoff Modeling of Superconducting Levitation Machines: Theory and Experiment

Based on the critical state model for the superconducting components, we develop a set of theoretical tools that allow extracting 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 2-D problems. This assumption includes the following: 1) rotational symmetric systems, as those in bearings and motors, and the case of 2) translational symmetry, as in long transportation lines. The theory, which 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.