Conceptual design and fabrication test of the HTS magnets for a 500 W-class superconducting DC rotating machine under 77 K

Conventional direct current (DC) rotating machines are usually used for crane and press machine using high torque in metal and steel industries, because of a constant output power along variable rotating speed. A general DC motor with permanent field magnets could not increase a magnetic flux density at a gap between armature coils and field magnets. However, a superconducting DC motor has field magnets composed with high temperature superconducting (HTS) coils and it could increase the magnetic flux density at the gap to over 10 times than those of a general DC motor by control the excitation current into HTS coils. The superconducting DC motor could be operated with extremely high torque and constant output power at a low rotational speed. In this paper, a 500 W superconducting DC rotating machine was conceptually designed with a LN₂ (Liquid Nitrogen) cooling method and the operation characteristics results of HTS field magnets were presented. The two no-insulation HTS magnets for a 500 W superconducting DC rotating machine were fabricated. The excitation current for the HTS magnets could be controlled from 0 to 40 A. This test results will be available to design large-sized HTS magnets for a number of hundred kW class superconducting DC rotating machine under LN₂ cooling system.