Magnet Guideways for Superconducting Maglevs: Comparison Between Halbach-Type and Conventional Arrangements of Permanent Magnets

The characteristics of the permanent magnets composing the guideway in superconducting magnetic levitation devices are very important for their performance in terms of levitation force and stability. From a model based on minimizing the magnetic energy in the superconductor and considering realistic parameters of actual maglev devices, we calculate the levitation and guidance forces and stability arising from both conventional arrangements and recently proposed Halbach-like arrangements. When a comparison is carefully made under similar conditions, we conclude that not always complicated arrangements based on Halbach arrays bring significant improvements with respect to some simpler arrangements that also provide large force. These results may help improving the design of actual maglev devices.