Experimental Validation of a Full-Size Pole Pair Set-Up of an MW-Class Direct Drive Superconducting Wind Turbine Generator

The article presents a full-size pole pair set-up of an MW-class direct drive (DD) high temperature superconducting (HTS) wind turbine generator. The set-up serves as a precursor to the world's first full-scale DD HTS generator developed within the EU-funded EcoSwing project. The set-up built for de-risking employs an HTS field winding in the rotor and a conventional copper armature winding in the stator, representing a minimum independent unit of the corresponding full generator. Such a prototyping approach well reflects the performance of the full generator at a low cost. The article first explains the main design considerations of the full generator, followed by designing and construction details of the set-up. Afterward, a number of tests for determining the key performance of the set-up are reported. The testing results showed that the HTS field winding ran stably at its rated current of 480 A and was well maintained below 30 K. Moreover, the tangential force in the set-up reached 29.8 kN, projecting the 2 MW target output power of the full generator. The set-up developed effectively validated the design ideas and engineering feasibilities of the full generator, leading to successful kick-off of the EcoSwing project.