Superconducting propulsion machines for future electric aircraft

Electrification of aircraft leads to reduced carbon emission and reduced noises, which has become a new research focus of aviation industry. Large electric aircraft requires high power density propulsion machines, which cannot be met by conventional solutions. High temperature superconductors can carry large amount of current with little losses, so they are ideal to construct machines with high power density. The PhD project will be focusing on developing propulsion machines with particular high power densities for electric aircraft, by using the latest high temperature superconductors. The application is expected to design, model and develop components of the superconducting machines, in order to understand the overall machine performance. The project also involves using new machine configurations to optimise power density. Superconducting propulsion machines connected with superconducting network will be studied numerically. In particular, the response of the machine under fault scenarios need to be studied to develop proper protection schemes.