Magnetically Levitated Homopolar Hollow-Shaft Motor

This paper describes a novel and compact topology for contactless levitation and rotation of a wide annular rotor through the walls of a sealed process chamber. In the proposed setup, a homopolar magnetic bearing biased by permanent magnets is combined with a high-pole-number segment motor. The paper discusses the functional principle of the motor, and gives design and optimization guidelines for the bearing and the drive unit, respectively. An experimental system is presented along with a set of measurement results verifying the theoretical considerations.