Research on Levitation and Guidance Characteristics of DSSC HTS-PMG Maglev System Integrating Upper Suspension and Down Hanging

The maglev train has great application potential in the field of high-speed transportation, which is based on high-temperature superconductor-permanent magnet guideway (HTS-PMG) maglev system. In order to break through the bottleneck of insufficient performance of the conventional upper HTS-PMG maglev system, it is of great value to explore a higher performance maglev configuration. In this article, the mechanical characteristics of the upper suspension and the down hanging type are studied through numerical simulation and experimental methods, and a new type of double-sided strongly coupled (DSSC) HTS-PMG maglev configuration is proposed based on the PMG concentrating magnetic field through the iron plate in the middle. The results show that the upper suspension and down hanging type complement each other in the characteristics of levitation force and guidance force, that is, when the levitation force (guidance force) of the upper suspension type increases (weakens) with the increase of cooling height, the hanging force (guidance force) of the down hanging type exhibits the opposite changing behavior, and vice versa. For the coupled system, within a certain levitation gap range, its levitation force and guidance force can be approximated as the linear superposition of the upper suspension and the down hanging, and the coupling degree of the system increases with the decrease of the levitation gap. Through optimization, the levitation force and guidance force are significantly improved. When the upper cooling height (UCH) and the down cooling height (DCH) are fixed at 20 and 5 mm, at the upper working height (UWH) of 15, 10, and 5 mm, the levitation force is respectively increased by 267.7, 105.7, and 46.8% compared with the upper suspension type. When the UCH is 20, 25, and 30 mm, the guidance force is, respectively, increased by 181.4, 201.2, and 188.2% at the lateral displacement (LD) of 20 mm compared with the upper suspension type. The above research results provide a design reference for the development of higher-performance HTS-PMG maglev train.