Hans Hieronymus

Experimental study of magnetic forces on normal and null flux coil arrangements in the inductive levitation system

We report on measurements of lift and drag forces exerted by various small-scale current-carrying superconducting coils, placed near a large rotating disk. In detail we have studied the influences of shape and arrangement of the coils, as well as the influences of plate thickness, velocity and suspension height. In some experiments the drag force was measured under constant load condition. Most of the experimental results are compared with exact calculations based upon the general theory recently given by Miericke and Urankar [1] for infinitely wide but arbitrarily thick sheet tracks. The agreement between experiment and theory was generally good, and we believe that predictions for large-scale systems can be made with confidence.