Levitation Force for Evaluation of the High Temperature Superconducting Maglev Vehicle Under Derailment

The main characteristic of high temperature superconducting (HTS) maglev vehicle is the self-stable levitation. However, it will suffer from all kinds of lateral forces from the surrounding circumstance, i.e., crosswind and centrifugal force. An important issue is that the vehicle must remain in stable equilibrium when subjected to various external disturbances, so study regarding operation safety for HTS maglev vehicle is much necessary and very important under derailment. We researched levitation forces of the HTS maglev vehicle under these conditions, and investigated suitable parameters for the evaluation via experiments' method. The two different PMGs and three different bulk high temperature superconductors (HTSC) arrays are considered in these experiments. The analysis indicates that the HTS maglev vehicle has the ability to dampen the vehicle against external disturbances under the derailment.