Conceptual Design of a 10 HP Homopolar Motor with Superconducting Windings

Superconducting motor has a lot of benefits from high power density for ship propulsions, so a number of research project are in progress worldwide. Despite of all the benefits, there is always a difficulty of cryo-moving part for conventional air-core superconducting synchronous motors. In order to get rid of this moving cryogenic part, we propose a homopolar superconducting synchronous motor, which has high temperature superconducting armature and field coils. The rotor is supposed to be made of iron only and excited by the stationary HTS field coils. The stationary field coils make the cooling system simple and easy to realize because there is no cryo-moving part. A design result of a 10 hp homopolar synchronous motor is presented in this paper. The self and mutual inductance of the motor having the size of air gap as variable parameter are calculated by a 3-dimemsional finite element method. The value of design variables such as the dimension of a motor and the number of turns, etc. is decided by performing the coordinate transformation of the calculated inductance. The operating frequency is supposed to be below 5 Hz for low rotating speed which is needed for a purpose of ship propulsion. Low frequency also has the benefit of low AC losses.