Comparison Between Coreless and Yokeless Stator Designs in Fully-Superconducting Propulsion Motors

Hybrid electric propulsion could be the solution to the ambitious environmental targets of the aerospace industry. Fully-superconducting machines have the potential to deliver the step-change in specific torque, power, and efficiency capabilities required for large civil transport aircraft applications. However, fully-superconducting machines are still in their infancy. This article investigates the electromagnetic design of two different stator design concepts for an ac fully-superconducting machine for an aerospace distributed fan motor application. A benchmark aerospace specification of 1 MW was chosen and the design of a conventional permanent-magnet machine was used to assess the performance of the two equivalent fully-superconducting ac motor designs. Following the guidelines from an experimental study of the losses in a small ac stator prototype with MgB2 coils, a fully-superconducting air-cored stator design and a new yokeless stator design are proposed. Both ac superconducting machine designs use superconducting bulk magnets mounted on a rotor core and an MgB2 superconducting stator winding. This article discusses the key design issues of the two stator layouts in relation to the current aerospace targets for efficiency and power density.