Research on a Superconducting Synchronous Generator for Wind Power

A superconducting synchronous generator (SSG) is proposed for wind power, in which magnesium diboride (MgB2) superconducting coils are employed as field windings. The stator is composed of conventional copper coils and iron core, while the rotor has no iron core. The whole refrigeration method is adopted in this paper. The thermal barrier is not placed in between the stator and the rotor as compared with the prior HTS generators, so a small air gap width would be possible. In order to study the electromagnetic characteristics of the SSG, finite element method (FEM) is implemented to optimize the SSG and obtain the no-load and load performance of the initial and optimized SSG. Finally, the optimized SSG is compared with a traditional synchronous generator (TSG) of the same power. The results indicate that the optimized SSG has many merits such as small size, light weight, high efficiency and high power factor.