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Comparison of High-Speed Bearingless Drive

Topologies With Combined Windings
Hubert Mitterhofer, Member, IEEE, Branimir Mrak, and Wolfgang Gruber, Member, IEEE

AbstractFor high-speed bearingless disk drives, certain topologies seem advantageous. The authors have published works on
a bearingless disk drive for high speeds that is characterized by a
slotless stator and a toroid winding set. Several different variations
of this setup are imaginable. The ones which this paper focuses
on are the variation of the number of phases, of the number
of coils, and of the applied coil connection. A comparison of
the constructed and tested setup with the possible variations is
presented in the course of this paper.
Index TermsBearingless drives, high-speed drives, toroid
winding, winding topologies.

I. I NTRODUCTION

EARINGLESS drives are a special form of magnetically

levitated devices, where the active magnetic bearing function is provided by the motor itself. The winding system can
be carried out with either separated or combined windings.
The former features actual suspension windings for conducting
the bearing currents, which are physically separated from the
motor windings. The latter instead superposes the two current
components in the control scheme and uses only one common
winding set for conducting the resulting currents. This increases
the compactness of the system while reducing the mechanical
complexity [1].
As a bearingless unit typically only stabilizes either radial
or axial deflections of the rotor, additional bearings are usually
necessary in order to fully stabilize a rotor. A disk drive represents the most compact overall design since it allows using the
passive stability in axial and tilt direction, which is inherently
provided by a flat magnetic rotor and its stator [2].
Manuscript received July 1, 2014; revised September 11, 2014; accepted
October 14, 2014. Date of publication November 12, 2014; date of current
version May 15, 2015. Paper 2014-EMC-0521.R1, presented at the 2014
International Power Electronics Conference (IPEC-Hiroshima 2014 ECCEAsia), Hiroshima, Japan, May 1821, and approved for publication in the
IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON I NDUSTRY A PPLICATIONS by the Electric Machines Committee of the IEEE Industry Applications Society. This work was
supported in part by the research project Sustainable and resource saving
electrical drives through high energy and material efficiency and is sponsored
within the program of the European Union Regionale Wettbewerbsfaehigkeit
OOe 20072013 (Regio 13) by the European Regional Development Fund and
the Province of Upper Austria and in part by the Austrian COMET-K2 program
of the Linz Center of Mechatronics (LCM) funded by the Austrian Federal
Government and the Federal State of Upper Austria.
H. Mitterhofer and B. Mrak are with the Linz Center of Mechatronics
GmbH, 4040 Linz, Austria (e-mail: hubert.mitterhofer@lcm.at; branimir.
mrak@lcm.at).
W. Gruber is with the Institute for Electrical Drives and Power Electronics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, 4040 Linz, Austria (e-mail: wolfgang.
gruber@jku.at).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIA.2014.2369820

Fig. 1.

High-speed disk drive prototype used for testing.

Fig. 2.

Winding scheme of the realized five-phase double coil prototype.

In earlier works, a prototype high-speed drive was built as a

bearingless disk drive with five phases supplying a combined
winding system (cf. Fig. 1). The rotor position is stabilized
passively in axial and tilt direction, whereas the radial position
signal from eddy current sensors is used to actively control the
radial degrees of freedom. A detailed system description can
be found in [3]. Since the drive was designed to run at up to
100 000 r/min, several measures have been taken for a suitable
high-speed design. For reducing iron losses, a slotless stator
was chosen that avoids higher slot harmonics [4]. Additionally,
a special toroid winding form was introduced to bearingless
drives in [5] and [6], which reduces the necessary copper length
and facilitates the manufacturing process. Additionally, the use
of thinly stranded conductors in this winding scheme reduces
the eddy current losses in the copper to a negligible amount.
In the mentioned scheme, which is displayed in Fig. 2, each
of the five phases is connected to two coils that are wound in
opposing winding sense. Recently, a project has been published

0093-9994 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.

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TABLE I
K EY DATA AND S TIFFNESS VALUES OF P ROTOTYPE D RIVE

[7] using a similar general drive idea and a winding structure

that applies six phases with one single coil for each phase.
This design is equally based on the high-speed related measures
previously presented. This calls for a comparison and a more
detailed investigation of the advantages of each scheme. Therefore, several design variations are investigated in this paper
with an explanation of the evaluation criteria, simulation and
comparison of six designs, and presentation of the measurement
results of the constructed prototype.
II. C OMPARISON S ETUP
For all investigated types, the stator and rotor dimensions
are identical with the values of the prototype drive given in
Table I. As the physical air gap width is also not modified,
the available winding space varies only slightly due to the different coil separators isolation space requirements for designs
with different coil numbers. For the 3-D finite-element (FE)
simulations, no certain wire gauge was specified, it was rather
assumed that the entire available winding space is filled with
a copper fill factor of kcu = 0.48, as this was the fill factor
obtained in the constructed prototype. The current density
peak value for the simulations was set to 6 A/mm2 . For the
generation of forces and torques, only the amount of ampere
turns is relevant. This means that the number of winding turns
is irrelevant for the motor itself, but it does have significant
influence on the applied power electronics circuit when it comes
to DC-link requirements. This subject is regarded in further
details in Section III-D.
It is, however, important to notice that all of the chosen
design variations need to keep intact the high-speed related
design measures previously described.

Fig. 3. Passive stabilization of axial and tilt displacement, active creation of

radial forces and torque.

angle dependent matrix T() has to be found, defining the

relationship between the vector of phase currents for the m
phases

i1
.
(1)
i = ..
im
and the radial force/torque vector

Fx ()
Q() = Fy ()
Tz ()

(2)

as
Q() = T()i.

(3)

The jth column of T() holds the angle dependent force

and torque value, which is created when only the jth phase is
powered with a constant current value, whereas the rotor rotates
about .
1) General Criteria: It may seem tempting to use this relationship for creating a bearing force evaluation criterion
2 
m


tF =

rms(T()i,j )

i=1 j=1

2m

(4)

and a torque evaluation criterion

A. Evaluation Criteria
As shown in Fig. 3, the presented drive with passive stabilization in axial and tilt direction needs to produce active bearing
forces in the two radial degrees of freedom and, of course, the
motor torque. Therefore, the torque and radial force capacity
of the different designs constitute the main comparison values.
However, there is no standard definition of these values for
bearingless drives as, e.g., the torque coefficients for conventional electrical drives. This is due to the fact that, here, forces
and torque have to be simultaneously created and that certain
winding properties have quite different effects on the torque
and force capacity. One way of obtaining a suitable evaluation
criterion is to look at the achievable force values for one distinct
direction (e.g., either Fx or Fy ) while producing no force in
the other direction and also no torque Tz . Therefore, the rotor

m


tT =

rms(T()3,j )

j=1

(5)

respectively. Unfortunately, the two aforementioned terms

would not yield a good basis for comparison since it is not
guaranteed in that case that only one of the components of
Q() is exclusively created. This however, is one of the key
features of a bearingless drive as we want to be able to produce
torque and forces independent from each other, and we also
want the force and torque comparison values to reflect this
property. We, therefore, have to turn to the inverse relationship
of (3), expressed as
i = K()Q()

(6)

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which links the demanded output Q() to the necessary phase

currents i. The matrix K() is calculated by inversion of T().
For this inversion, additional criteria such as the star connection
of the motor phases or a minimum winding loss criterion are
necessary since usually, T() is not a square matrix. The
detailed process of obtaining and inverting the matrix T() is
described in [8]. Applying the currents

1
(7)
iF x () = K() 0
0

0
(8)
iF y () = K() 1
0

0
(9)
iT z () = K() 0
1
ensures that, in the respective situation, only the demanded
force or torque component is produced without exciting any
other components. Applying the currents in the appropriate
ratios according to (7)(9) with the highest current not exceeding the current specification, gives the mentioned maximum
exclusive torque or maximum exclusive force in one distinct
direction. Calculating the rms values of iF x (), iF y (), and
iT z () and then taking the mean value over all phases leads to
more suitable comparison values for bearingless drives, which
were introduced in [9], using the force and torque constants
kF =

2m
m 
2


(10)

rms(K()i,j )

i=1 j=1

kT = 
m

(11)

rms(K()i,3 )

i=1

respectively. The constants kF and kT can be interpreted as the

reciprocal mean value of the minimum rms current necessary to
create 1 N of Fx or Fy force or 1 N m of Tz torque. These constants, therefore, have the units N/A and N m/A, respectively.
They provide a very adequate comparison value for the different
designs; however, for kF , there are two potential flaws. The first
one comes from the fact that only distinct force directions (Fx
and Fy ) are regarded and evaluated. The additional use of the
rms value of K() means that there may be certain rotor angles
where only little forces and torques can be created but which,
in this comparison, would stay unnoticed.
The second weakness of this criterion is that the forces and
torques used for the calculation of T and K are normalized to
1 A-turn (ampere-turn) of magnetomotive force, thus eliminating the link to the available copper cross section of the
respective motor design.
2) Start-Up Criterion: From this conclusion, we can take
one step further and rethink the meaning of the radial force
components that the force factor kF is based on. These components, i.e., Fx () and Fy (), stand for the force in x- and
y-direction for all rotor angles, respectively. This means, how-

Fig. 4. Comparison of (top) simulated forces in x- and y-direction and

(bottom) of torque, which are created with constant current in one single coil
over one rotor revolution when the rotor is either in a centered position or in an
eccentric position. The eccentric scenario illustrates the start-up situation as the
rotor deflection is changed together with the rotor angle. The comparison was
done exemplarily for the 6 ps design.

ever, that all other positions apart from the x- and y-direction
are not regarded, although they may show different maximum
force values. This is of critical importance for the starting
process, when the rotor sticks to the stator due to the reluctance
forces and needs to be lifted out of this resting position into the
center position. Therefore, this criterion will be named startup criterion. Forces of any direction may be required, since the
resting position may be in any point around the stator surface,
with, theoretically, any rotor orientation. We must, therefore,
look at every force direction and, for each one, evaluate the
minimum force over the rotor angle . In doing this, we can
no longer use the rms value of K() and we also cannot use
the mean value of the Fx and Fy force. As the resulting term is
not simple to interpret, a more intuitive graphic approach will
be chosen for evaluating the different designs.
The start-up moment is also special concerning the initial
rotor position, which is eccentric as the magnet rests in the
touchdown bearings. The deflection of the rotor is exactly the
physical air gap with a value of 0.5 mm, as mentioned in
Table I. This eccentricity does influence the force capacity of
the drive but as the magnetic air gap m is nine times as wide
due to the slotless stator topology, the effect is small. Fig. 4
shows the simulated active forces and the torque, which are
created when one coil is energized with a constant current
density of 6 A/mm2 , whereas the rotor is rotated about 360 .
In both situations, the centered rotor position and the eccentric

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Fig. 5. Exemplary setup and winding scheme of the five-phase single coil
(5 ps) setup with the rotor showing the diametric magnetization direction. The
6 ps and 8 ps setups are structured accordingly.

Fig. 6. Exemplary setup and winding scheme of the eight-phase double coil
(8 pd) setup with the rotor showing the diametric magnetization direction. The
5 pd and 6 pd setups are structured accordingly.

rotor position, are compared. In the latter case, the direction of

the rotor deflection also changes with the rotor angle so that
one of the poles of the rotor magnet is always touching the
touchdown bearing. Because only a slight difference can be
observed, the eccentric position effect can be neglected.
B. Evaluated Designs
As mentioned in the introduction, several design variations
are imaginable for the toroid disk drive setup. The chosen
variations feature a phase number of either 5, 6, or 8 phases
with either one single coil or a set of a double coil connected in
antiseries (the two connected coils are would in opposite sense).
These resulting six variations are hence called 5 ps (five phases,
single coil), 5 pd (five phases, double coil), and further 6 ps,
6 pd, 8 ps, and 8 pd. Figs. 5 and 6 exemplarily show the winding
schemes of the 5 ps and 8 pd topology.
III. C OMPARISON R ESULTS
A. Validation of Simulation Approach Through Measurement
For obtaining the comparison data, the targeted setups were
magnetostatically simulated using a 3-D FE solver. Of course,
all of the simulations use the same stator and rotor geometries,
rely on the same nonlinear stator iron characteristics and also
allow the same current density in the winding. Only the available copper cross section ACu per phase varies with the chosen

Fig. 7. (Blue) Simulation-based and (red) measurement-based exclusive force

(Fx and Fy in newtons in top and middle row) and exclusive torque creation
(Tz in mN m in bottom row) for the 5 pd and 6 ps topology.

phase number due to the different number of isolation walls

between the coils.
During the simulations, one phase was energized with a
constant current density of 6 A/mm2 , whereas the permanentmagnet rotor was rotated in order to obtain the respective values
of achievable forces and torque dependent on . The resulting
vectors are normalized to 1 A-turn of magnetomotive force and
are then used to calculate T(), following the calculation of
evaluation criteria outlined in (Section II-A).
Since two of the designs, i.e., the 5 pd and the 6 ps version,
were already available as prototypes, the same procedure as
in the simulation was also carried out at a test bench. Fig. 7
shows the comparison of the overall achievable Fx , Fy , and
Tz values when all phases can be optimally energized while
only respecting the limitation due to exclusiveness (no other
force or torque created) and the star connection of the system.
The quantitative mismatch of up to 19% can be explained with
the ideality of the simulation including the ideal filling of the
available winding space. In the real prototype, the winding
space can only hold a whole number of winding turns which,
at a fixed current density for simulation and real prototype,
can lead to a certain discrepancy in available copper cross
section and thus of the current linkage. Additionally, a certain

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Fig. 9. Winding scheme of (left) 8 ps and (right) 8 pd, including the rotor
showing the diametric magnetization direction.

C. Force Comparison

Fig. 8. Maximum torque in mN m over rotor angle in degree for all six
topologies when no radial forces are created.

imprecision of the angular winding distribution and of the

measurement process adds to the mentioned error. However,
except for a certain phase shift of about 10 notable in the
figures of the 6 ps topology, the characteristics of the simulated
data fits the measurement quite well. This decent qualitative
agreement justifies the further use of simulation results for the
comparison of the remaining designs.
B. Torque Comparison
The maximum torque calculation as it was used for the
comparison of simulated and measured data in the bottom row
of Fig. 7 is now used for comparing the six designs under
consideration. Fig. 8 gives the six torque curves, where the
single coil designs are displayed in dashed lines and the double
coil designs are shown in solid lines.
The single coil versions using six or eight phases are clearly
the best choices concerning torque creation. Both have similar
peak values, whereas the torque ripple is more prominent in the
six-phase design. Next in line is the 5 ps version and only then,
the double coil variants follow. It is interesting to note that an
increase in the number of phases is beneficial for the single coil
but detrimental for the double coil designs.
Both effects, i.e., the superiority of the single coil arrangements and the torque capacity reduction with rising phase
number in the double coil arrangements, can be explained with
a look at Fig. 9, where the winding schemes of both eightphase designs are given exemplarily. The single coil design
can emulate a quasi-full pitch coil, producing only torque and
yielding a winding factor of 1, by having, e.g., positive current
in phase 1 and negative current in 5. Contrary to that, the two
connected coils of each phase in the double coil design are short
pitched and thus have a very small winding factor.
Table II holds the torque constant kT , which is given in
(11), the mean torque value for a current density of 6 A/mm2
over one rotor period and the torque ripple peak to peak value
relative to the mean torque.

Let us finally take a look at the radial bearing forces. As proposed in (10) and given in Table II, a force constant kF can
be used for evaluating the different designs. Due to the mentioned potential flaw of these factors (cf. Section II-A), Fig. 10
considers the start-up criterion mentioned in Section II-A2.
For this purpose, the capacity of the single designs to produce
forces was not only evaluated for the x- and y-axis but rather,
for all directions in between. First, one such distinct force
direction was chosen. Then, the ability of the design, to produce
exclusively force in this direction (no force perpendicular to it,
no torque), was evaluated over all rotor angles. This resulting
values are plotted as one blue line in Fig. 10. This way, all
force directions from a mechanical angle of 0 to 360 in steps
of 10 15 were evaluated. The overlay of all these blue lines
allows to draw the red dashed in-circle, which gives the amount
of minimum force, which can be generated regardless of the
rotor angle and the required force direction.
There are two main striking points about the comparison in
Fig. 10. The first one is that the fear of a dead spotan
angular position where significantly less radial forces could be
produced than in the principle x- and y-axis, thus not allowing
the rotor to levitate out of that position if the active bearing
characteristic was designed exclusively according to kF was
needless. The second one is that, although the range between
minimum and maximum force value is quite different for the
six designs, the minimum producible force represented by the
in-circle is similar.
D. Comparison of Power Electronics Requirements
For comparing a complete drive system, it is important to
consider the power electronics requirements, as well as the individual performance characteristics of the motor. The number
of phases (N ) is a crucial parameter since, when considering
a classical power electronics circuit with half-bridges and a
stator-connected winding system, it directly gives the number
of necessary semiconductors in the half-bridges (2N ), and
of the required current sensors (N 1). However, the real
question for reaching a power electronics-motivated design
choice is rather if the circuit is a custom design for the drive
or if standard off-the-shelf components are to be applied. The
customized solution is not unlikely since, depending on the
application, it may be beneficial to have a compact circuit to

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TABLE II
OVERALL C OMPARISON

standard three-phase inverters [10] is, of course, only applicable

to up to six phases.
Apart from the design-related phase number, also the number
of winding turns is an important parameter for the power
electronics as it is directly linked to the back electromotive
force and reciprocally linked to the output currents. However,
with a fixed current density, which is specified in Section II, this
feature does not influence the compared design characteristics.
E. General Remark
It is important to notice in the comparison in Table II that the
factors kT and kF are normalized values. They do not take into
account that there is less winding space available in the designs
with higher phase numbers or two coils instead of one coil
per phase. In contrast to that, the mean torque and minimum
producible radial force do reflect this difference in copper
volume as they are based on results for identical current density.
Thus, while the kT and kF are suitable for making a principle
topological comparison, the mean torque and minimum force
values should be used for judging the actual potential of a
design. The 8 pd topology, for instance, shows significantly
higher kT and kF factors than the 5 pd design, whereas it
performs worse than the 5 pd for equal current density.
IV. C ONCLUSION

Fig. 10. Overlay of the polar force plots in newtons for the evaluation of
the start-up criterion for all designs. Every blue line represents the maximum
achievable force in one distinct direction, which is evaluated for all rotor angles
. The resulting minimum producible force range is displayed with a red
dashed line.

go with the compact bearingless motor, integrating all system

components such as the controller, the sensor signal treatment,
and the power semiconductors. In this case, the cost for the
additional semiconductors and current sensors in the designs
with high phase number will be negligible. In the second case,
when off-the-shelf products are used, the choice of an eightphase design is very unlikely as the possible combination of two

The results of the topology comparison are summarized in

Table II, allowing several interesting conclusions.
The choice of appropriate comparison values is essential. For
the case of the motor torque, the proposed torque constant kT
should not be taken as the only evaluation criterion. Since the
available copper cross section is not taken into account but instead, only the values normalized to 1 A-turn of magnetomotive
force are used, the resulting values are of theoretical nature. The
actually achievable mean torque is a better choice when looking
at the real performance of a certain design. The same is true
for the bearing forces, where the constant kF does not take the
winding space into account and is thus misleading. Generally
speaking, the topologies with higher number of phases or coils
show a higher ratio of kT to mean torque and of kF to minimum
radial force.
Once the criteria for the comparison are chosen and the
simulation and postprocessing is done, it becomes quite evident
that the 5pd topology chosen for the prototype drive is not the

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ideal choice. Even without increasing the phase count, the 5 ps

topology would constitute a better choice.
On the overall comparison, the eight-phase single coil arrangement would constitute the best choice of the compared
topologies for both torque and force creation. This conclusion
seems plausible as that winding scheme is the only one, where
both the two-pole field for torque creation and the four-pole
field for force creation can be reproduced perfectly due to the
appropriate coil placement.
However, an eight-phase machine also demands at least eight
half-bridges in the used power electronics circuit. Depending
on the decision on either building a custom power electronics
circuit or using standard components (cf. Section III-D, either
the 8 ps or the 6 ps designs should be regarded as the most
promising designs.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank all involved institutions and
partners for their support.
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[1] K. Raggl, T. Nussbaumer, and J. Kolar, Comparison of winding concepts
for bearingless pumps, in Proc. 7th Int. Conf. Power Electron., 2007,
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[2] R. Schob and N. Barletta, Principle and application of a bearingless slice
motor, in Proc. 5th Int. Symp. Magn. Bearings, 1996, pp. 313318.
[3] H. Mitterhofer, W. Gruber, and W. Amrhein, On the high speed capacity of bearingless drives, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., vol. 61, no. 6,
pp. 31193126, Jun. 2014.
[4] N. Bianchi, S. Bolognani, and F. Luise, High speed drive using a slotless
PM motor, IEEE Trans. Power Electron., vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 10831090,
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[5] H. Mitterhofer, W. Gruber, and W. Amrhein, Towards high speed bearingless drives, in Proc. 12th Int. Symp. Magn. Bearings, 2010, pp. 16.
[6] H. Mitterhofer and W. Amrhein, Design aspects and test results of a high
speed bearingless drive, in Proc. IEEE 9th Power Electron. Drive Syst.
Conf., 2011, pp. 705710.
[7] D. Steinert, T. Nussbaumer, and J. Kolar, Concept of a 150 krpm bearingless slotless disc drive with combined windings, in Proc. Int. Elect.
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[9] S. Silber, W. Amrhein, H. Grabner, and R. Lohninger, Design aspects

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Hubert Mitterhofer (S09-M13) studied mechatronics at Johannes Kepler University (JKU), Linz,
Austria, and the Universit de Pirre et Marie Curie,
Paris, France, and received the Diploma from JKU
in 2008. He is currently working toward the Ph.D.
degree at JKU.
His research is focused on bearingless high-speed
drives and magnetic bearings. Since 2013, he has
been working as a Researcher with the Linz Center
of Mechatronics GmbH. His interests include agriculture technology and renewable energies.

Branimir Mrak received the Masters degree in

electrical engineering from the University of Rijeka,
Rijeka, Croatia, in 2013. His masters thesis titled
High Speed Bearingless Drives was done in cooperation with Johannes Kepler Universitt Linz,
Linz, Austria. He is currently working toward the
Ph.D. degree at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven,
Leuven, Belgium, focusing on the design of energyefficient mechatronic drive lines.
After finishing his studies, he continued working
with high-speed drives and magnetic bearings at the
Linz Center of Mechatronics GmbH, Linz. Since August 2014, he has been
with Flanders Mechatronic Technology Center, Belgium.

Wolfgang Gruber (S06M10) received the Dipl.Ing. degree in mechatronics and the Ph.D. degree
from Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz, Linz,
Austria, in 2004 and 2009, respectively.
Since 2004, he has been a Scientific Assistant
with JKU, involved in teaching and various research
projects. He is currently an Assistant Professor with
JKU and a Senior Researcher with the Austrian
Center of Competence in Mechatronics GmbH. His
research interests include active and passive magnetic bearings, bearingless motors, brushless motors,
and the control of these devices.