A magnetic bearing
A magnetic bearing is a type of bearing that supports a load using magnetic levitation. Magnetic bearings support moving parts without physical contact. For instance, they are able to levitate a rotating shaft and permit relative motion with very low friction and no mechanical wear. Magnetic bearings support the highest speeds of all kinds of bearing and have no maximum relative speed.
Active bearings have several advantages: they do not suffer from wear, have low friction, and can often accommodate irregularities in the mass distribution automatically, allowing rotors to spin around their center of mass with very low vibration.
Passive magnetic bearings use permanent magnets and, therefore, do not require any input power but are difficult to design due to the limitations described by Earns haw’s theorem. Techniques using diamagnetic materials are relatively undeveloped and strongly depend on material characteristics. As a result, most magnetic bearings are active magnetic bearings, using electromagnets which require continuous power input and an active control system to keep the load stable.In a combined design, permanent magnets are often used to carry the static load and the active magnetic bearing is used when the levitated object deviates from its optimum position. Magnetic bearings typically require a back-up bearing in the case of power or control system failure.
Magnetic bearings are used in several industrial applications such as electrical power generation, petroleum refinement, machine tool operation and natural gas handling. They are also used in the Zipped-type centrifuge, for uranium enrichment and in turbo molecular pumps, where oil-lubricated bearings would be a source of contamination.
Design
Basic operation for a single axis
An active magnetic bearing works on the principle of electromagnetic suspension based on the induction of eddy currents in a rotating conductor. When an electrically conducting material is moving in a magnetic field, a current will be generated in the material that counters the change in the magnetic field (known as Lenz’s Law). This generates a current that will result in a magnetic field that is oriented opposite to the one from the magnet. The electrically conducting material is thus acting as a magnetic mirror.
The hardware consists of an electromagnet assembly, a set of power amplifiers which supply current to the electromagnets, a controller, and gap sensors with associated electronics to provide the feedback required to control the position of the rotor within the gap. The power amplifier supplies equal bias current to two pairs of electromagnets on opposite sides of a rotor. This constant tug-of-war is mediated by the controller, which offsets the bias current by equal and opposite perturbations of current as the rotor deviates from its center position.
The gap sensors are usually inductive in nature and sense in a differential mode. The power amplifiers in a modern commercial application are solid state devices which operate in a pulse width modulation configuration. The controller is usually a microprocessor or digital signal processor.
Two types of instabilities are typically present in magnetic bearings. Attractive magnets produce an unstable static force that decreases with increasing distance and increases at decreasing distances. This can cause the bearing to become unbalanced. Secondly, because magnetism is a conservative force, it provides little damping; oscillations may cause loss of successful suspension if any driving forces are present.
Applications
Magnetic bearing advantages include very low and predictable friction, and the ability to run without lubrication and in a vacuum. Magnetic bearings are increasingly used in industrial machines such as compressors, turbines, pumps, motors and generators.
Magnetic bearings are commonly used in watt-hour meters by electric utilities to measure home power consumption. They are also used in energy storage or transportation applications and to support equipment in a vacuum, for example in flywheel energy storage systems . A flywheel in a vacuum has very low wind resistance losses, but conventional bearings usually fail quickly in a vacuum due to poor lubrication. Magnetic bearings are also used to support maglev trains in order to get low noise and smooth ride by eliminating physical contact surfaces. Disadvantages include high cost, heavy weight and relatively large size.
Magnetic bearings are also used in some centrifugal compressors for chillers with a shaft made up of magnetic material lies between magnetic bearings. A small amount of current provides magnetic levitation to the shaft which remains freely suspended in air ensuring zero friction between the bearing and the shaft.
A new application of magnetic bearings is in artificial hearts. The use of magnetic suspension in ventricular assist devices was pioneered by Prof. Paul Allayer and Prof. Houston Wood at the University of Virginia, culminating in the first magnetically suspended ventricular assist centrifugal pump (VAD) in 1999.
Several ventricular assist devices use magnetic bearings, including the Life Flow heart pump, the Dura Heart Left Ventricular Assist System, the Levitronix Centrica, and the Berlin Heart. In these devices, the single moving part is suspended by a combination of hydrodynamic force and magnetic force. By eliminating physical contact surfaces, magnetic bearings make it easier to reduce areas of high shear stress (which leads to red blood cell damage) and flow stagnation (which leads to clotting) in these blood pumps.
Synchrony Magnetic Bearings, Waukesha Magnetic Bearings, Canetti Technologies, and S2M are among the magnetic bearing developers and manufacturers worldwide.
Fluid bearings are bearings in which the load is supported by a thin layer of rapidly moving pressurized liquid or gas between the bearing surfaces. Since there is no contact between the moving parts, there is no sliding friction, allowing fluid bearings to have lower friction, wear and vibration than many other types of bearings.
They can be broadly classified into two types: fluid dynamic bearings (also known as hydrodynamic bearings) and hydrostatic bearings. Hydrostatic bearings are externally pressurized fluid bearings. Where the fluid is usually oil, water or air, and the pressurization is done by a pump. Hydrodynamic bearings rely on the high speed of the journal (the part of the shaft resting on the fluid) to pressurize the fluid in a wedge between the faces. Fluid bearings are frequently used in high load, high speed or high precision applications where ordinary ball bearings would have short life or cause high noise and vibration.They are also used increasingly to reduce cost. For example, hard disk drive motor fluid bearings are both quieter and cheaper than the ball bearings they replace.
