Design Study of a High Temperature Superconducting Generator with Ybco Windings

This paper considers the potential merits of using a HTS rotor winding in a low-speed high-torque synchronous generator and the possibility of building a small-scale demonstrator to investigate the practicality of building such a full-size machine. Pareto optimization results are presented for a full size machine with a high temperature superconducting rotor winding made from a new generation YBCO material and for three configurations of demonstrator. Because evaluation of FEM models is usually computationally expensive, a variation of Kriging method has been used for this optimization. A number of design issues and some other configurations of demonstrator are discussed. Some sensitivity analysis was performed to determine the importance of: the temperature of the HTS winding, the size of the demonstrator, and the clearance between the HTS coils and the warm parts of the machine.