A General Method to Simulate the Electromagnetic Characteristics of HTS Maglev Systems by Finite Element Software

For practical maglev systems, the mutual effects among the bulk superconductor and the permanent magnet are primarily investigated to provide useful implications for the design. This paper proposed a general simulation method to demonstrate the electromagnetic behaviors of a levitation system. The basics properties including the distributions of the induced current and the levitation/guidance force of a bulk superconductor have been calculated while moving in the nonuniform magnetic field generated by a permanent magnet guideway. This numerical method is based on solving the partial differential equations time dependently and adapted to the commercial finite element software COMSOL Multiphysics 5.3. It is worth mentioning that relative movements are solved to simulate more real test scenarios with the moving mesh and automatic remeshing in COMSOL. Simulation results are intuitive for the generation of electromagnetic behaviors and show a good consistency with previous experimental data. We conclude that this simulation method can be a powerful tool for researchers and engineers to investigate analogous problems with a greater level of flexibility and expandability.