Practical design and operating characteristic analysis of a 10 kW HTS DC induction heating machine

• We developed the 2D and 3D FEM analysis model of a HTS DC induction furnace.
• The conduction cooling system for the HTS coil was fabricated and tested.
• The final temperature inside of the billet reached 773.15 K after 480 seconds.

Conventional induction heaters have been in operation in metal and related industries with poor energy efficiencies of only 50–60%. Also, the efficiency of atmosphere furnace, one of the various heating facilities for metal billets, is about 20%. Hence, a high temperature superconducting (HTS) DC induction heating machine to heat a rotating metal billet under uniform magnetic field generated by the 2G HTS magnet with about 80–90% of the system energy efficiency has been researched in this paper.We presented practical design specification, operational characteristics, and temperature distribution on a 10 kW class HTS DC induction heating machine which had been built and tested. The saturated temperature of an HTS no-insulated(NI) coil in the cryostat fabricated with 100 A of the operating current reached 45.9 K and the magnetic field at the centre point between two iron cores measured 0.2 T. The rotating machine for 4.1 kg of the aluminum billet was tested on 1760 rpm of the rated rotating speed. The final temperature of the aluminum billet has risen up to 500 °C for 480 s. The research outcomes are expected to be useful for the design of a large scale HTS DC induction heating machine in industries.