1247. Designing an Electromagnetic Levitation System for High Speed Ground Transportation Vehicles

Paper

Abstract

The overriding design goals for electromagnetic levitation and guidance systems for high speed vehicles are: minimum weight of the magnets and their power supplies; minimum cross section of the steel armature rails on the track.
The properties of a magnetic circuit such as force, power, eddy currents etc. and their effects on a magnetic levitation system are surveyed. It is shown how they contribute to the weight of the system. To minimize that a computer algorithm was devised which, for a preselected magnet shape, determines the dimensioning parameters of the maglev system by an iterative procedure. Some of the relationships between the physical parameters involved are mathematically exact, some are approximations based on experience and experiments. Six magnets of different sizes have been calculated and built. Their performance agreed well with the predictions.