Preliminary Design of a Mid-Range Superconducting Wireless Power Transfer System for Magnetic Levitation Vehicles: Application to the MagLev-Cobra

This work presents a mid-range wireless power transfer (WPT) system that uses a high-temperature superconducting coil in the transmitter circuit to increase the efficiency of the system. The presented system is foreseen to provide energy to superconducting magnetic levitation vehicles and is intended to be implemented in the Brazilian MagLev-Cobra. The developed concept is based on an Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) system, using magnetic core reactors (MCR) to tune the resonant frequency under load variations, which arise in the charging process of the vehicle. Based on this architecture, the proof of concept was demonstrated in a laboratory-scale system, namely by assessing the performance as a function of the distance between the receiver and the transmitter coils, as well as its misalignment.