Design And Implementation Of A Fault-Tolerant Magnetic Bearing System For Turbo-Molecular Vacuum Pump

One of the obstacles for a magnetic bearing to be used in the wide range of industrial applications is the failure modes associated with magnetic bearings, which we don’t expect for conventional passive bearings. These failure modes include electric power outage, power amplifier faults, position sensor faults, and the malfunction of controllers. Fault-tolerant magnetic bearing systems have been proposed so that the system can operate in spite of some faults in the system. In this paper, we designed and implemented a fault-tolerant magnetic bearing system for a turbo-molecular vacuum pump. The system can cope with the actuator/amplifier faults as well as the faults in position sensors, which are the two major fault modes in a magnetic bearing system.