Feedback Control of a Permanent Magnet Biased, Homopolar Magnetic Bearing System

Magnetic bearings are increasingly being used in a wide variety of applications in the industry such as compressors, turbines, motors, generators etc. Also, there are different types available depending upon their construction. The research presented here investigates a high temperature permanent magnet biased magnetic bearing system which is jointly being researched by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Electron Energy Corporation (EEC). The purpose of this research was to develop a permanent magnet biased magnetic bearing system using high temperature (HT) permanent magnets (PM) developed by EEC. This system was designed for high performance, high temperature (1000F) and high speed applications. The entire system consisted of two radial bearings, two catcher bearings, one axial thrust bearing and a motor. The central rotor shaft is powered by a high temperature permanent magnet motor to be able to run at the designed conditions of 20,000 rpm. This thesis documents the design of a feedback control law that stabilizes this HTPM biased AMB levitated system and summarizes efforts to build a test rig for the HT tests of the machine. A decentralized PD control law is used to achieve successful levitation. An existing PD analog controller with single input single output (SISO) control law for each axis (previously used for a flywheel test rig) is used as a feedback controller for this HTPM magnetic bearing system. Modeling and simulation of the resulting closed loop system is done in Matlab to test for stability and an iterative approach leads to optimum values of proportional and derivative gain pairs. The notch filter locations are also determined through this closed loop iterative simulation.