Mixed Flow Artificial Heart Pump With Axial Self-Bearing Motor

Aiming at a small blood pump with a levitated rotor, this paper introduces a design scheme for an axial-type self-bearing motor. The axial type, which is basically composed of a disc motor and an axial magnetic bearing, controls both the rotation and the axial translation of a rotor. The proposed motor is similar to the bi-directional disc motor except of changing the magnitudes of both side of flux to control the axial attractive force. However, the radial and tilt directions rely on passive stability and, therefore, has poor damping. The design involves the hydrodynamic bearing for improving the radial support property. Finally, the experimental setup is made to confirm the capability of the proposed motor and to apply to the mixed flow pump. The experimental results showed that the bi-directional axial-type self-bearing motor has high capability for a small continuous flow blood pump with enough flow rate and head.