Magnetic Levitation Between a Slab of Soldered HTS Tape and a Cylindrical Permanent Magnet

Stacks of commercial high-temperature superconducting tape can be cut and soldered together to form slabs of a large range of shapes and sizes. They are most interesting for magnetic levitation applications due to the flexibility of geometry, allowing them to be created in large thin slabs suitable for planar rotary magnetic bearings and linear maglev bearings. In this paper, the axial levitation force was measured between a field cooled slab of 30 x 30 mm and a 25-mm-diameter rare-earth permanent magnet ( PM), which produced a cylindrically symmetric field necessary in the context of rotary bearings. The force results were compared with that achieved between the same PM and a larger 43-mm-diameter bulk MgB2 disk, as well as to FEM modeling using the Perfectly Trapped Flux approximation.