Bearingless Motor Technology for Industrial and Transportation Applications

This paper reviews bearingless motor technology for use in large transportation and industrial applications. Historically, bearingless motors have resided in research settings and certain niche commercial applications. Significant literature has been dedicated to developing designs that feature highly-specific geometry, restricted by applications with a unique set of needs, oftentimes with low power requirements. The first part of this paper reviews existing and potentially new use-cases of magnetic levitation in transportation and industrial applications. The second part of the paper presents design sizing equations of promising bearingless motor topologies for these applications and highlights efforts to generalize and increase the power rating of bearingless motor technology.