A Fault-tolerant Drive System of Active Magnetic Bearing

The non-contact magnetic bearings are widely used in high-speed rotating machinery. As the safety issue is one of the priorities of the whole system, in this paper, a fault-tolerant drive system is proposed. The proposed drive system with fullbridge converter architecture has two modes: the normal mode and the auxiliary mode. It can ride-through the open-circuit failure of power electronics devices in the drive and keep levitation. Failure of power electronics devices can be detected through the winding current in the magnetic bearing. Experimental results are provided in this paper to validate the failure detection and fault-tolerant control capability with levitation.