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ORAL CONTRIBUTIONS
MagLev-Cobra: A Brazilian Magnetically Levitated Vehicle
Guilherme Gonçalves Sotelo 1 , Daniel Henrique Nogueira Dias 1 , Rubens de Andrade Jr. 2 ,
Richard Magdalena Stephan 2
1 Universidade Federal Fluminense
2 Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
A magnetically levitated (MagLev) transport system is under development at the
Laboratory for Applied Superconductivity (LASUP) in Rio de Janeiro. This vehicle is
entitled MagLev-Cobra (“cobra” means snake in Portuguese), because it is composed by
several modules and during the curves it resembles the movement of a snake. The main
application of this vehicle is the people urban transportation, one important problem in
big cities. The technology adopted for this vehicle consists of levitating high
temperature bulk superconductors (HTS) above an external magnetic field, whose origin
is a guideway made with Nd-Fe-B and steel. This technology has been extensively
studied for more than 12 years by researchers of LASUP. The bulk superconductors are
located inside cryostats and they are cooled by liquid nitrogen (LN2). This
superconducting levitation was adopted due to the following reasons:
• it is possible to levitate a mass of approximately 1000kg at a 10mm gap spending
energy only for refrigerating the HTS bulks (four cryostats with 20 liters of LN2 keep
this mass levitating during approximately one day);
• the high cost of the magnetic guideway is compensated by the high frequency of the
vehicles circulating along the line;
• the civil engineering costs are much lower than that necessary for subways.
A linear induction motor was designed and constructed for the vehicle’s traction.
This special motor was projected to produce force in the vertical direction, helping the
levitation, besides the traction force. The main advantages of MagLev-Cobra vehicle
are: low energy consumption, negligible noise emission, curvature radius of 50 meters
and capability to ascend ramps of 15%. These properties allow the vehicle to be
perfectly adjusted to cities layout and to be constructed along roads and rivers profiles.
The first unit of a functional prototype was finished recently. In this work, some initial
tests of this unit are presented.
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