Experimental Characterization and Mathematical Modeling of High-Tc Superconductors for Magnetic Bearings

An experimental study of the levitation forces aimed to supply informations for the design of superconducting magnetic bearings was conducted on melt-textured YBCO materials. Such materials demonstrate sufficiently good levitation capabilities and complicated strongly non-linear force-position dependence. An analytical model for levitation force which is based on the Bean critical state concept and that takes into account the inhomogeneity of the materials is proposed in this paper. The comparison of experimental and numerical results shows that the proposed model can be used for quantitative prediction of the behaviour of magnetic levitation systems.