Driver Circuit Design for a New Eddy Current Sensor in Displacement Measurement of Active Magnetic Bearing Systems

Position sensing is one of the crucial parts of the active magnetic bearing (AMB) system. The printed circuit board (PCB) eddy current position sensor is a new type of position sensor for the AMB system, which makes a compact structure, high sensing quality, and is low cost. In this article, an improved driver circuit is proposed for this new sensor. The driver circuit includes an excitation circuit and signal conditioning circuits. A crystal oscillator circuit with a power stage is used to provide the excitation coil with a stable excitation source of high stability and good precision of frequency. The analog demodulation circuit is designed for signal conditioning circuits to extract the rotor displacement information from the sensing coil outputs. Compared with the state-of-art driver schemes, the proposed method reduces the circuit complexity and cost. Accordingly, the experimental results show that the designed sensor has good linearity and sensitivity, and it can ensure AMB stable operation at the rated speed.