Concept Design of a 1.4 MW Drive for Rotor Loss Minimization in a Partially Superconducting Motor

Partially superconducting machines with cryocooler-cooled rotors are a potential near-term technology that can achieve the motor performance needed by future fixed wing electric aircraft. For this type of machine, minimizing cryogenic heat load is one of the keys for enabling high machine performance. Rotor eddy current loss is often the most difficult cryogenic heat load to mitigate due to current ripple from the motor drive. This paper presents the concept design for a 20 kW/kg, 99.5% efficient motor drive that has sufficiently low current ripple to enable high performance partially superconducting machines by minimizing eddy current loss in the rotor. The motor drive concept design uses a resonant, interleaved, and multilevel topology to achieve these high-performance metrics with little current ripple. Rotor magnetic loss analysis using NASA’s 1.4 MW High Efficiency Megawatt Motor (HEMM) is used in the design process to down select the motor drive topology and show that the final design generates less than 5 W of magnetic loss in the rotor.