3-D Transient Modeling of Bulk High-Temperature Superconducting Material in Passive Magnetic Bearing Applications

Bulk high-temperature superconductors are being considered for use in several engineering applications, including passive magnetic bearings. These bearings, apart from being passive, i.e., inherently stable, also offer the promise of lower bearing losses; thus, they are being considered for use with flywheels for energy storage in applications related to frequency regulation and for correcting forecasting errors associated with renewable energy sources. The effort presented in this paper was undertaken to characterize the performance of these bearings such as longitudinal and transverse stiffness and loss characteristics. To this end, a finite-element method (FEM) using the T- Ω potentials was used for the formulation. The results of the FEM were verified with experiments. These experiments are described. This FEM tool was also used to guide the development of a reduced-order model, which could run faster and, therefore, could be used in larger system simulations. Some discussions about the run time on a desktop PC are also presented.