A Superconducting Linear Variable Reluctance Machine for Urban Transportation Systems

This paper presents a new superconducting linear variable reluctance machine for urban transportation applications. The proposed linear machine has a doubly salient structure. Its armature adopts segmented configuration and houses both the copper armature winding and the high-temperature superconducting field winding, while the salient-pole rail consists of iron core only with no excitation sources. Performances of the proposed machine are analyzed and evaluated by the finite element method. By using segmented armature design, the force ripple can be suppressed to 5.5% that is very desirable for urban transportation systems.