Development of high power density pulsed AC generator

A pulsed ac (PAC) generator designed and built by Westinghouse Electric Corporations´s Science & Technology Center has been in use at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) for nearly two years. It has operated flawlessly in a continuous duty mode producing millions of pulses. The experience gained at SNL indicates that by sacrificing some measures of performance it is feasible to design higher power density machines for other applications. In the short term there are several incremental enhancements that can be made to the existing iron based design, but in the longer term new designs using advanced materials and design concepts must be developed. One of the more promising of the advanced concepts involves the use of hyperconducting windings cooled to 20 K by liquid hydrogen (LH /sub 2/) or to 28 K by liquid Neon (LNe).