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. Ic for the HTS coils was found to be suppressed due to the influence of the temperature and the leakage field. © 2014 IOP Publishing Ltd.