Design and Analysis of a High-Speed Permanent Magnet Compensated Pulsed Alternator

Compensated pulsed alternator (CPA, Compulsator) is a pulsed power supply with high power density and energy density. The principles of electromagnetic shielding and magnetic flux compression are used to provide a huge pulse current to the load. In order to reduce the mass or volume of the alternator and increase the storage density, high-strength composite materials are used in the air-core CPA. They are the preferred sources of modern electromagnetic weapon systems because of their merits. A high-speed air-core permanent magnet CPA (PMCPA) was presented in this paper with Halbach array PM topology of the rotor. The heavy external excitation source was not needed, so the volume and mass of the entire discharge system was reduced. Due to the special topology of air-core PMCPA, the parameters of the PMCPA were designed based on the theory of electromagnetic field analysis, numerical, and analytical methods. The finite element method simulation model is built based on the dimension parameters of CPA. The discharge process is simulated by Ansys Maxwell to optimize the performance of PMCPA.