An Active Magnetic Damper Concept for Stabilization of Gas Bearings in High-Speed Permanent-Magnet Machines

The successful application of ultrahigh-speed electrical-drive systems in industrial products is currently limited by lacking high-speed bearing technologies permitting high reliability and long lifetime. Promising bearing technologies for high rotational speeds are contactless bearing concepts such as active magnetic bearings or gas bearings. While magnetic bearings usually are major electromechanical systems with substantial complexity, gas bearings allow compact realizations with high load capacity and stiffness; however, poor dynamic stability has been limiting their use at high rotational speeds. Following a hybrid bearing approach with an aerodynamic gas bearing for load support, a small-sized active magnetic damper concept is proposed to enable the stable high-speed operation of the gas bearing with a minimum of additional complexity and costs. As for the effective stabilization of the gas bearing, a high-quality displacement measurement is essential, and a new eddy-current-based rotor-displacement self-sensing concept employing an auxiliary signal injection and rotor displacement measurement circuit is presented. A hardware implementation of the proposed concept is shown providing high-resolution measurement signals.