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A. Schulz, B. Gross, M. Neumann, J. Wassermann:
"A sophisticated active magnetic bearing system with supreme reliability";
Talk: The Eleventh International Symposium on Magnetic Bearings (ISMB 11), Nara, Japan; 2008-08-26 - 2008-08-29; in: "Proceedings of ISMB 11", K. Nonami, T. Mizuno, M. Komori (ed.); (2008), Paper ID 333, 7 pages.

Within this work a new active magnetic bearing (AMB)-system offering supreme reliability is presented. It provides bearing capacity even in case of a defect within any sub-assembly over the whole operating time. Each AMB consists of completely decoupled electromagnet (EM)-channels configured in hot redundancy, comprising a singular EM, controlled and driven by a decentralized hot-swap controller amplifier module (HCA) and one displacement sensor. Each HCA is responsible for controlling the position of the structure towards its dedicated EM and comprises a digital controller, a switching amplifier, local power supplies, and a local error detection unit. All functional EM-channels contribute to support the structure. On occurrence of an error within a certain EM-channel this error is detected by the local error detection unit and the defective EM-channel automatically shuts down. The adjacent redundant EMchannels take over the bearing functionality and the defective sub-assembly can be replaced during system operation (hot-swap) without degrading system performance. This paper gives detailed information on the AMB functionality and the HCA design.