In April, Hinetics LLC tested a prototype motor outfitted with superconducting rotor magnets. They showed it could work at power levels high enough to power a regional passenger airliner with multiple motors.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/electric-aircraft-motor-hinetics
3 Comments
Superconductors are exciting, but practical uses are hard to find. Is this use feasible for high temperature supercondctors?
They’re only using super conductors for the rotor. But combined with a slotless or iron less stator this still has huge potential to be an improvement. Specially motor performance scales with the square or cube of average air gap flux density. Current motors run 0.5 to 0.7 Tesla due to saturation of the iron stator slots. If this can push average flux density to 1 to 1.5 Tesla that’s a BIG gain.
Could this kind of development finally make maglev railways an economical proposition?