Magnetically Levitated High-Speed Ground Transportation

Several of our engineering staff were an integral part of the MIT Magneplane Project led by Drs. Henry Kolm and Richard Thornton in the early 1970s. Magneplane was the first superconducting magnetically levitated high-speed ground transportation prototype, and was designed and built at MIT, in conjunction with Raytheon, United Engineers, AVCO, Alcoa, 3-M and the NSF. It was tested successfully at the Raytheon facility in Wayland, MA. The Magneplane, a 1/25th-scale model was able to carry a camera to document its stable travel along a similarly scaled guideway. Other significant achievements of the project included development of means to model and control electromagnetic vehicle dynamics, and of active shielding of passengers.

During the early 1990s, there was a resurgence of interes int MAGLEV in the USA. The PSFC played a principal role in two of the National Maglev Initiative System Concept Definition programs. In one of these, the Division served as co- principal investigator with Magneplane International, coordinating and managing the efforts of team of six major industrial collaborators. In the other, the Division supported the team headed by Bechtel Corp. Our contributions comprised vehicle magnet design, guideway conductor optimization, field and force analysis, including static force calculations for vehicle/rebar interactions, design strategies for magnetic shielding of the passenger cabin, and systems integration for efficient, cost-effective implementation. We also were involved in one of the BAA (Broad Agency Announcement) contracts: the topic of this project was the application of superconducting Cable-in-Conduit Conductors (CICC) to Maglev applications.

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