Geometrical Effects on the Levitation Capability of Multiseeded Y–Ba–Cu–O Blocks

Using a well-established theoretical model to calculate the levitation behavior of multiple high-temperature superconductors, the levitation capability of multiseeded Y–Ba–Cu–O blocks over two promising permanent-magnet guideways (PMGs) was evaluated and its dependence on the number of seeds was clearly displayed. The multiseeded Y–Ba–Cu–O blocks are ideally supposed to be composed of a set of single domains that are magnetically coupled but electrically insulated, which means we only consider the intragrain current. This assumption is a prerequisite for avoiding the complexity of assessing the morphology of the intergrain current, which is actually weaker than the intragrain current due to the unsolved obstacles in material process such as the weak link of grain boundary that impedes the current transfer across the grains. The insights attained by this numerical study, being inaccessible from experiments, tell us that, given the width of the Y–Ba–Cu–O block, the levitation force is found to be mostly degraded as the number of the seeds increases or the width of each seed decreases, whereas the lateral force exhibits a more complex behavior.