The use of stranded conductors to reduce Eddy losses in guideway conductors of high speed vehicles

It has been shown recently that the guideway conductors of high-speed trains will have to be segmented in order to keep the eddy losses induced by the large fields of the cryogenic magnets within reasonable limits. This paper describes an experimental program which has demonstrated that the normal stranding used in manufacturing aluminum and copper cables produces sufficient strand isolation, that strand insulation will not be required to keep the eddy losses small. The average measured difference in losses between cables having uninsulated strands and those having insulated strands was only 10 per cent for both the TE and the TM mode for both aluminum and copper cables.