Development and testing of a 2.5 kW synchronous generator with a high temperature superconducting stator and permanent magnet rotor

High temperature superconducting (HTS) armature windings have the potential for increasing the electric loading of a synchronous generator due to their high current transport capacity, which could increase the power density of an HTS rotating machine. In this work, a novel synchronous generator prototype with an HTS stator and permanent magnet rotor has been developed. It has a basic structure of four poles and six slots. The armature winding was constructed from six double-pancake race-track coils with 44 turns each. It was designed to deliver 2.5 kW at 300 rpm. A concentrated winding configuration was proposed, to prevent interference at the ends of adjacent HTS coils. The HTS stator was pressure mounted into a hollow Dewar cooled with liquid nitrogen. The whole stator could be cooled down to around 82 K by conduction cooling. In the preliminary testing, the machine worked properly and could deliver 1.8 kW power when the armature current was 14.4 A. I_c for the HTS coils was found to be suppressed due to the influence of the temperature and the leakage field. (paper)