t was theoretically and experimentally proved that High Temperature Superconducting (HTS) Maglev had huge potential employment in rail transportation and high speed launch system. This had attracted great research interests in practical engineering. The optimization design was one of the most important works in the application of the HTS Maglev. As the NdFeB permanent magnet and HTS materials prices increased constantly, the design optimization of the permanent guideway (PMG) of HTS maglev became one of the indispensable works to decrease the cost of the application. This paper first reviewed four types of PMGs used by the HTS Maglev, then disucssed their structures and magnetic fields. Finally, the optimization methods of these four PMGs were compared. It was suggested that with better optimization methods, the levitation performance within a limit cost got better. That would be helpful to the future numerical optimization of the PMG of the HTS maglev.

This paper is devoted to numerically investigate the structural effect of the permanent magnet guideway (PMG) on the dynamic characteristics of a levitated high temperature superconductor (HTS). Being different from the existing results of this subject, this work considers the magnetic stimulation with translational symmetry (being not axisymmetric) and the geometry of the PMG to provide the external field has been economically optimized by a self-developed intelligent scheme, which makes our studies be closer to the practical situation. We introduce a 2-D finite-element model of generalized magnetic vector potential to theoretically describe and numerically solve the electromagnetic behavior of HTS over the PMG. A secondorder dynamic equation is applied to characterize the vertical vibration of the levitated HTS subject to external disturbance, and it couples the electromagnetic model via the levitation force. We studied three typical configurations of PMG, all of which have been regarded as candidates in the development of the HTS maglev transit.