Design Study of 10 MW REBCO Fully Superconducting Synchronous Generator for Electric Aircraft

Future aircraft are expected to have low noise pollution, low emission, and low fuel consumption. A fully turbo-electric propulsion system was proposed by NASA with these aims. The advantages of fully superconducting rotating machines are their weight and efficiency, owing to a high current density resulting in no iron core and no joule heat. In this paper, 10-MW fully superconducting generators with REBa
₂
Cu
₃
Oy (RE: Rare Earth, Y, Gd, Eu, and others, REBCO) superconducting tapes were studied in relation to their output power density and efficiency. The target output power density is over 20 kW/kg. Fully superconducting generators of 10 MW were designed, then a numerical simulation of the rated operation was conducted. The ac loss of the superconducting windings, iron loss of the yoke, total efficiency, dry weight, and output power density were evaluated, and their dependence on the operating temperature and the synchronous rotating speed were investigated. Here laser-scribing of the wires into a multifilamentary structure and transposed parallel conductors were introduced for ac loss reduction and current capacity enhancement. Consequently, the efficiency reached 99.2% in the case where the REBCO superconducting tapes were scribed into a 10-filament structure. The best model achieved a power density of 26.7 kW/kg. The iron yoke accounts for approximately half the total weight of all the models. The result suggests that the development of superconducting shields brings significant improvement to the output power density.