New tubular fault-tolerant permanent-magnet motor for artificial heart

Implanted total artificial hearts (TAHs) is becoming a main therapy for the heart failure patients. Instead of the nature hearts, the reliability of the TAHs is very important to the security of human life. To improve the fault-tolerance of the TAHs, this paper proposes a new tubular fault-tolerant permanent-magnet motor, termed as the dual-channel linear oscillating actuators (DC-LOAs), for total artificial hearts (TAHs). The two channels are isolated thermally, physically and magnetically. The two windings work independently. If one winding fails, the other winding can provide continued operation. Hence, the proposed DC-LOA offers high fault-tolerant performance and high reliability. In addition, the double-stator topology is adopted, which significantly improves power density. The electromagnetic characteristics of the proposed DC-LOA are analyzed by using the time-stepping finite-element method (TS-FEM), and the results confirm the validity of the proposed TAH device.