Scaling Up of HTS Motor Based on Trapped Flux and Flux Concentration for Large Aircraft Propulsion

A high temperature superconducting (HTS) motor has been designed to power a general aviation aircraft. The propulsion requirements of the Cessna 172 have been chosen as baseline for the study: 200 HP at 2700 RPM. The designed motor is based on flux trapping in bulk YBCO plates and concentration of the flux generated by Bi-2223 coils and an ironless air-cooled resistive armature. The eight-pole machine would exhibit high power density comparable to that of small gas turbines around 4 HP/lb. Details of this HTS motor concept have been presented in a previous paper. However, the scaling up of such a configuration is not straightforward, as single domain YBCO elements cannot exceed a few centimeters in diameter. This paper presents the design of a motor based on the same configuration but with a much higher power rating, in the range of several MW, to power high altitude long endurance (HALE) aircraft or small jets. Due to the size limitation of the YBCO plates, two solutions can be used to increase the power: the radius and the number of poles can be increased, or the motor can be lengthened to accommodate more coil-plate pairs. The motor is able to reach more than 2 T in the air gap thus leading to high power density. The design optimization is done with respect to several objectives as a trade-off between amount of superconductor, efficiency, weight and volume. The cooling system is assumed to be provided by liquid hydrogen available onboard the aircraft as fuel for the fuel cells or turbo-generators.