Hardware Platform for Magnetic Bearing Control in Machine-Tool Applications

In this paper a new and powerful control hardware for magnetic spindle applications is presented. The Hardware consists in two boards. The processor board assembles a floating point DSP, a high density FPGA and a TCP/IP communication Module. It is in charge of the control algorithms processing, system monitoring and real time data acquisition. The interface board assembles all the hardware modules needed to access external devices such as digital I/O, ADCs and DACs, encoder modules and so on. Moreover the most prominent features of the hardware devices and the reasons that have motivated the new design are described. Since control strategy imposes computation requirements, a brief description of control algorithms is included. How this algorithm is distributed along the processor device is discussed as an example for control software implementation in the new hardware. Finally, the new hardware design performance and benefits are enumerated and future work is presented.