Design and Comparison of Different Kinds of Radial Magnetic Bearings

This paper discusses the design of the electromagnetic part of a radial bearing. Especially the result of the choice between four and three pole-pairs per bearing and homopolar / heteropolar are discussed. Main result is that more or less the total volume of the bearing depends on this design decisions. However one can see that homopolar bearings are longer then heteropolar ones. Comparing bearings with four or three polepairs per bearing the bearings with three pairs are also a little bit longer than the correlating ones with four pairs.