Weight Reduction of the Damper Coils in the Superconducting Magnetically Levitated Bogie

The superconducting magnetically levitated (Maglev) transportation system has been developed in Japan. This system is based on the side wall electrodynamic suspension (EDS). Although the EDS system has the advantage of stable levitation without active control, results of the numerical simulation show that the damping factor of the levitation system is small. Thus additional damper system has been proposed to increase damping of the system against oscillation of the bogie. The specifications of the damper coils are decided by the damping effect against the natural vertical oscillation of the bogie. The weight of the conventional damper coils is heavy. So weight reduction of the damper coils is needed. In this paper reduction of the damper coil weight is considered. Optimization of the damper coil with 50% weight reduction is studied. Running simulations with the weight reduction have been undertaken. The weight of the reduction model becomes half as that of the conventional one. This means size of the damper coils becomes small, and effect of the damper coil should decrease. But in this semi-active damper mode, it's damping factor increases and oscillation of the bogie converges faster than that by the conventional one.