for this orbit which are being used for design purposes are 58.7 and 35.7 min, respectively. Some form of energy storage is needed for the orbital solar-based power systems to power the space station while it is in the Earth eclipse portion of its orbit. Thus the energy storage system must provide the operational power for the station for a period of 35.7 min and be capable of being charged during the 58.7 min solar phase of the orbit. High temperature superconducting magnetic energy storage was investigated as a means of fulfilling the energy storage requirement for the NASA space station. One advantage of HTSC magnetic energy storage is in its potentially high round trip—charging and discharging—efficiency as compared with competing storage systems. This high round trip efficiency will result in benefits which will be reflected in improved attibutes of other power system components and mission support infrastructure. Other benefits will result from the increased operating flexibility due to the ability of HTSC storage to accomodate high charging and discharging rates, high repetition rates and higher depth of discharge than many competing systems. Benefits accrued in this manner are called ‘cascading benefits’. Examples of such cascading benefits from HTSC technology are given in Tables I and II and Fig. 1. Previous work in 1982 on liquid helium superconducting energy storage systems has indicated the potential of this technology for space applications. Some of this work resulted in a conceptual design of a conventional superconducting magnetic energy storage system [6]. As a result of the previous work, a comparison of the attributes of
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