Micro motor with MEMS foil bearing

This is a micro motor from Celeroton with foil bearing support. The foil bearings were made from MEMS process and designed by Professor Kim at UT-Arlington. The motor was tested upto 400,000rpm when the dummy impeller and the top foil from one of the front foil bearings (opposite side to the impeller) became loose. Root cause was not clear whether the bearing failure triggered the impeller loose or vice versa. We tried different foil bearing, i.e., Inconel bump foil bearings, and observed the same event at around 400krpm. We concluded the rotor had undesirable vibration mode at around 400krpm which triggered the impeller loose creating severe imbalance to the system. We are redesigning the rotor and increasing the bearing size to 6.4mm. Will keep you updated our progress

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Science & Technology

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• IMG
• 0446