Development of a Miniaturized and Autonomous Vacuum Maintenance System

Legacy copper-based power distribution and degaussing cables will not be able to meet the future requirements of Navy ships and submarines. While cable systems employing high temperature superconductors (HTS) have the potential to meet this need, further development work is required to improve the performance and increase the technology readiness level of key system components. The proposed work focuses on developing miniature vacuum pumps that will be used to autonomously maintain the high-vacuum spaces in cryogenic HTS components. Currently, periodic manual intervention is employed to maintain HTS vacuum spaces. This process is capital and labor intensive, which leads to very high operational costs. Creare plans to develop a miniaturized, autonomous, and rugged vacuum system that can be integrated with existing and future HTS components. In Phase I, we will complete a proof-of-concept demonstration of our system. In Phase II, we will develop and test a prototype system.