Development of a cooling system for superconducting wind turbine generator

This paper deals with the cooling system for high-Tc superconducting (HTS) generators for large capacity wind turbines. We have proposed a cooling system with a heat exchanger and circulation pumps to cool HTS field windings designed for 10 MW-class superconducting generators. In the cooling system, the refrigerants in the stationary and rotational systems are completely separated; heat between the two systems exchanges using a rotational-stationary heat exchanger. The refrigerant in rotational system is circulated by highly reliable pumps. We designed the rotational-stationary heat exchanger based on a conventional shell-and tube type heat exchanger. We also demonstrated that heat exchange in cryogenic temperature is possible with a commercially available heat exchanger. We devised a novel and highly reliable cryogenic helium circulation pump with magnetic reciprocating rotation system and verified its underlying principle with a small-scale model.